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“... of the Mid-Victorian reform of the English universities. Clearly and simply, in a serious book, Wallace relates how the good opinion of things German disappeared during the First World War. Wissenschaft and German civilisation were disparaged. Memories of hikes on German mountains, of sculling on the Weser and exciting days in the laboratories and seminars ...”

“... her preface she talks of the ‘continuous struggle of kings and nobles’. Thirty years ago J.M. Wallace-Hadrill’s classic textbook on barbarian Europe warned against the ‘black untruth’ of claiming a fundamental opposition between kings and their aristocracy. On Charlemagne’s grandson Dr McKitterick writes: ‘Whereas the lay aristocracy was divided ...”

“... writer represented here: the Library has significant Modernist holdings (Joyce, Yeats, Wallace Stevens – none of whom Amis had much time for), as well as extensive collections of Stevenson and Jack London, the latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s second wife. The ...”

“... Ican list​ a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers ...”

“... and thus ‘unmask’ what is being done by people whose highest hopes are still those of John Stuart Mill. When people who take this line are asked what alternative concepts they would recommend, they usually reply that the question is premature. Self-criticism must come first. We need to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence, or to become aware of the ...”

“... national subjects are confidently expected to rally. Remarkably, some Scots still find in Mary Stuart an embodiment of their own aspirations – despite modern prejudices against absolute monarchy and murder. James Mackay, for example, prefaces his own account of the Queen with similar remarks about her current significance: I make no apology for offering ...”

“... mainlines of its predecessors, has already undermined the traditional interpretations of Tudor, Stuart and Hanoverian Parliaments, but it is still new, and a great deal of work remains to be done. In doing it, these so-called revisionists will do well to remember the fate of their ancestors. Stubbsian and Namierite interpretations rose because they ...”

“... the first research fellowship at the new Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born analyst of Britain, went looking for somewhere to live. He had already been in Britain for 13 years, in Oxford and London. He wasn’t unaware that prejudice against immigrants existed. But the West Midlands was the first place, he ...”

“... assured was not only Elizabeth’s posthumous reputation, but her greatness in comparison with her Stuart successor. Even Camden, emphasising and extolling her love of peace, could be used to invoke the glorious days of Elizabethan sea-power, exercised against the hated Spaniard, in sharp contrast to James’s friendship with Spain and refusal to fight for his ...”

“... and endearingly modest in their self-effacement – Darwin, his fellow naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, the mathematician Mary Somerville – there is a sizeable and equally endearing dose of egotism. As Oscar Wilde observed, the personal memoir, even if written for friends and family alone or to satisfy an importunate publisher, is always delightfully ...”

“... but, unlike hanging, it does not necessarily concentrate it. I not long ago read the letters of Wallace Stevens, that highly cerebral poet, who, in these letters, again and again cautions against reading too much. Stevens felt that too much reading left too little time for thinking. In part, no doubt, he had in mind the kind of thinking that a serious poet ...”

“... Burke, who has recently lost his job at a university development office, and the ultra-rich Purdy Stuart, now a donor to the university, who could get him that job back. Once upon a time the two of them lived together in a collegiate bohemian squalor that masked their class differences. Milo aspired to be a painter but his ambitions never really passed beyond ...”

“... there was some ideological coherence in Marvell’s career is starting to gain acceptance: John Wallace, Annabel Patterson and Warren Chernaik have all concentrated on secular political thought. Stocker is the first critic to bring to Marvell the new awareness in recent historical writing of the centrality of the book of Revelation for 17th-century ...”

“... taking him to the steam room in the Senate gym, where he met Jacob Javits of New York and Stuart Symington of Missouri: ‘They were standing there, two feet away from me, reaching out to shake my hand. And they were all as naked as the day they were born.’ It must be easier to reach across the aisle when you’re hanging out with your buddies in ...”

“... sons, sisters and brothers’. Most were written by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage ...”