“... indistinguishable from one another, as in Yegorushka’s remembrance of his grandmother. ‘The Bishop’, a late story which Chekhov completed in 1902, two years before he died, is a good example of this new fluency in storytelling. A dying cleric starts to think about his childhood, and suddenly, he is adrift. He remembers ‘Father Simeon, who was very ...”

“... a fearsome reputation, equal to that of opium. William Caine, an 1890s abolitionist MP quoted by James Mills, claimed it was the ‘most horrible intoxicant the world has yet produced’. In 1924, the Egyptian statesman Mohamed El Guindy called it ‘a terrible menace to the whole world’. A moral panic in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly in America but with ...”

“... as was done in 1531 when Henry VIII had poisoning made treasonable by statute in order to have the bishop of Rochester’s cook boiled to death for poisoning the Lambeth Palace stew (a measure cited by Lord Hoffmann in the House of Lords’ debate on the Rwanda safety bill as an early example of unprincipled ad hoc legislation).Treason’s​ path, so far as ...”

“... the mysterious (for an idealist) phenomenon of ‘outness’, a favourite word he had unearthed in Bishop Berkeley; and a large element of his huge and contradictory mind remained deeply attached to those ‘external things’ that were otherwise meant obligingly to fleet away before the enchantments of Mind. Wordsworth, likewise, began his autobiographical ...”

“... to the dusty place that Enkidu discovers in Gilgamesh), often translated in the King James Bible as the ‘pit’. It was not until around the time of Christ that the Pharisees (but not the Sadducees) became believers in personal immortality, St Paul being their most famous Christian convert. Casey admires the ‘unflinching realism’ of ...”

“... and speakeasies of Clerkenwell, St Pancras and Lambeth, and the open air of Copenhagen Fields and Bishop Bonner’s Fields were turned into speakers’ corners, while in Lancashire and Yorkshire, the rocky Pennine moors became natural amphitheatres for latter-day tribunes, with tens of thousands assembling at places such as Blackstone Edge and Kirkstall ...”

“... since 1528, in which year More, chartered by his old friend Cuthbert Tunstal, who was also his bishop, had begun to read and to refute the ‘pestilent books’ of Luther’s English sect. Some of these Tunstal had already caused to be confiscated and publicly burned in an attempt to stem the flood-tide of the Reformation in England. (Erasmus was more of a ...”

“... go through these doors in a weekend, many may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which ...”

“... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...”

“... forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’ ‘Like what we imagine knowledge to be’. There are many ways of imagining knowledge – this is a proposition not likely to provoke much dispute. But how about this one? There are many ways in which the imagination creates and ...”

“... leaders of the coup which only eight days previously had ousted the populist government of Maurice Bishop. Now there is a rumour that Austin and Coard’s party is planning to infiltrate St James (a tiny island, four miles to the south of Grenada), intending to use it as a base for their subversive activities in the ...”

“... three tomes in quick succession: Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (1987), James Woodress’s Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1987) and Hermione Lee’s Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up (1989). More recently, Benjamin Taylor published Chasing Bright Medusas (2023), and now Garrett Peck’s The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her ...”

“... a hideous woolly jumper displaying the flags of the EEC nations. Back in the mid-1970s the tycoon James Goldsmith, the future founder of the anti-European Referendum Party, was a prominent supporter of the Common Market. The position of the press also changed. In the earlier campaign the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express enthusiastically made the case ...”

“... and so is Browning’ – expresses a view shared by admirers such as George Eliot and Henry James, doubters like Carlyle and Hopkins, and a chorus of others. But the history of poetry is a history of revolutions in what counts as poetry. Today, Browning’s density, his chattiness, his specificity, his preference for dramatic and narrative forms, even ...”

“... man caught in a momentary spotlight: the famous scene of doubt and resolution is told, in the King James translation, in about 150 words. But here was something longer, more circumstantial, more actual – a twenty-year mission, a journey through broadly identifiable places around and across the southern tip of India. Could the story be true? And if it was how ...”