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“... It was followed by two survey exhibitions, both organised by Janis, that included paintings by John Kane, Horace Pippin, Anna Mary Robertson Moses (aka ‘Grandma Moses’) and Hirshfield. In They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century (1942), Janis described them as ‘artless, ingenuous, refreshingly innocent’, successors of ...”

“... Wittgenstein to John Maynard Keynes:When I saw you last I was confirmed in a view which had arisen in me last term already: you then made it very clear to me that you were tired of my conversation etc. Now please don’t think that I mind that! Why shouldn’t you be tired of me, I don’t believe for a moment that I can be entertaining or interesting to you ...”

“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra ...”

“... than twenty miles from Thurkill’s village), owed a debt in turn to Marco Polo. Less famous, but no less fascinating, is the Franciscan William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium, written about forty years before Polo’s work. A reluctant messenger for Louis IX, later St Louis, William carried a letter from the French monarch to Kublai’s predecessor, Möngke ...”

“... time in earlier communities. Perhaps there is too great a reliance upon certain writers (such as John Aubrey and Philip Stubbes), and arguably the eccentricities of some folkloric approaches are countenanced over-generously: but Laroque would be the first to admit that the sources are fragmentary, and his coverage of a range of anthropological perspectives ...”

“... revolutionists with a schema. The pervasive influence of Country publicists like Thomas Gordon, John Trenchard, Bolingbroke and Benjamin Hoadly on colonial pamphleteers is now taken for granted. American historians have tested Bailyn’s thesis by extending and particularising it. This is what T.H. Breen has done in Tobacco Culture. The impact of Country ...”

“... Now that Dr Lee has produced a pictorial history of the Anglo-Boer War, one wonders why no one had thought of doing so before. This, of course, is how we are always inclined to greet an unusually good idea. The text accompanying the photographs informs us that the war coincided almost precisely with the birth of photography as a popular hobby ...”

“... Herbert, fourth earl of Pembroke, with his family. His faithful transcription of Van Dyck’s Lord John Stuart and His Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart, thought to have been completed on site at Cobham Hall in the 1760s, is one of his finest achievements. Even Reynolds praised the copy as indistinguishable from the ...”

“... trap – and in Ottessa Moshfegh’s fiction there are better or worse entrapments, but there is no not being trapped. The divorcée in her short story ‘Bettering Myself’, which won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, keeps half her life – ‘clothes, books, unopened mail, ashtrays’ – trapped between the bed and the wall. The protagonist of her ...”

“... to display an admiration that he considered indecent in front of a foreign witness?Maigret had no hesitation in silently scoring himself a point.To be fair, in the restaurant car, Mr Pyke had marked one up in turn. A trivial matter. A faint pinch of the nostrils at the arrival of the bacon and eggs, incontestably inferior to those of his own country.There ...”

“... licence. And surely, how can one speak of the Irish as a ‘great people’? I see no greatness, nor any kind of superiority in them, & they seem to me an inferior and 3rd rate race, whose virtues are of the cheapest and shallowest order, while their vices are peculiarly cowardly and ferocious. They have been abominably treated in the past ...”

“... seemed to render the safe, deliberate pace of the Madisonian formula obsolete. Yet daring or no, the great inertial system of the Constitution – of checks and balances, of party government and bureaucracy, of judicial obstructionism and Federal decentralisation – continued to impede the efforts of Wilson to make the world safe for democracy, and of ...”

“... come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party Conference is part of a long tradition whereby Britishness has been defined primarily by reference to a real or an imaginary Other. Understandably so, since defining this entity in its own terms ...”

“... I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very ...”

“... a sturdy wooden seat placed within the hull so that it is sheltered as if by an arbour. There is no water in sight except a definitely non-navigable stream. Anyone who sits here has no choice but to stare across the meadows, usually full of cows, towards a large pile of reddish, crumbling masonry. The inscription on the ...”