“... King’s Hall the following day, a journalist tells me it was 200 years ago this morning that Lord Edward Fitzgerald issued the order for the United Irish Uprising to commence. A man my age points to a former terrorist a yard from us: ‘Hi, see thon fella – he put a contract out on me in the Seventies. I had to move South.’ The press pack are ...”

“... younger contributors to James Berry’s anthology look to the tradition of the native Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite, not to that of the Trinidadian internationalist Derek Walcott, whose learned allusions – ‘as Ugolino did’, ‘that phrase of Traherne’s’, ‘those sheeted blighters, the Stoics’ – must denote for them a poetry of political ...”

“... his cause and urged the queen to make him her attorney-general. When that office fell to his rival Edward Coke, he set his sights on the solicitor-generalship, but with an equal lack of success. Bacon had offended Elizabeth I by his opposition in Parliament to some of her financial demands and Essex was a tactless supplicant. In a well-intentioned but almost ...”

“... That was the response in the early 1970s, when Anthony Barber, chancellor of the exchequer in Edward Heath’s government, made his ‘dash for growth’. While never doctrinaire, Heath had begun as something of an economic liberal; but the upshot of Barber’s great inflation was a massive expansion in government ...”

“... information on some of the ruptures in the alliance.In 1973, Henry Kissinger was infuriated by the Heath government’s public stance against US actions in the Arab-Israeli war. He responded by temporarily cutting off British access to the Five Eyes feed. But US leaders rarely found it hard to keep the British in line. The more difficult question was whether ...”

“... Sinclair told Parliament in 1803, ‘but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath; let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement!’ Almost one hundred acts of enclosure a year were passed between the publication of the Essay on Population in 1798 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars.The immediate success of the pamphlet ...”

“... which, came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing the corner of Hampstead Heath between the Spaniard’s Inn and the footpath to Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a little coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and compose it myself, and that was a laborious business. I wrote it 13 ...”

“... its provenance’, but never quite decides what it does seek to be. Judicious selections from Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or ...”

“... memoirs make clear.) In Place of Strife was the dog that barked but did not bite; so was Edward Heath’s Selsdon Park programme in the face of the Upper Clyde sit-in of 1972. As government policy, though not perhaps as public mood, the consensus ended for the same reason as other quiet revolutions in British politics: the threat of an empty ...”

“... to this emergency was instant and unexpected:By contrast to Harold Wilson’s government in 1967, Edward Heath’s ministers almost immediately publicly accepted their responsibility for Ugandan South Asians … This was a noteworthy decision, not least because public support in Britain for non-white immigration was extremely low. An August poll recorded ...”

“... claimed to have seen Macbeth and Banquo ‘riding through a wood’, rather than a ‘blasted heath’, before meeting ‘three women fairies’ at the beginning of Macbeth. There is nothing in Shakespeare’s text to indicate any such spectacle; and Barton thinks that, in all likelihood, Forman’s vivid imagination was simply transposing onto the Globe ...”

“... now are some very familiar names – Jonathan Culler, Christopher Norris, Annette Lavers, Stephen Heath etc – and under his guidance, we gather, they all got on extremely well, ‘preserving a tone of good humour in the midst of the most serious, even the most fierce, exchanges’. Kermode remained, as he declared in Continuities, ‘more in favour of ...”

“... baroque phase, as Gottlieb was tasked with coming up with ways to dispose of foreign leaders. His Heath Robinson schemes included using an aerosol to lace the air with LSD in the Havana studio where Fidel Castro made his radio broadcasts, sprinkling Castro’s boots with thallium salts to make his beard fall out and contaminating his cigars with botulinum. At ...”

“... literate (Tomalin quotes a halting letter) ended his life corresponding with Edmund Gosse and Edward Elgar, and lived long enough to scent posterity’s massive approval of his work. The boy whose mother in 1833 had watched from the roadside the passage of Princess Victoria hosted the Prince of Wales at his own house in 1923: Tomalin includes the famous ...”

“... were brimming over with the spirit of Romanticism, passion for the elsewheres and the beyonds, for heath and moorland, cliff and crag, cataract and glade, for long drifting walks through the night, as when Dorothy Wordsworth and William and Coleridge set out to watch the moon rise over the Severn. The association with the country as an authentic native ...”