“... with divine authority over the Church. The Puritans generally supported the royal supremacy as the means to keep Popery down. But what happened if, as under Mary Tudor or Charles I, it was used not to suppress Popery but to promote it? There is a persistent opportunism in the conduct of England’s various Protestant groups towards the State’s control of the ...”

“... were either soured by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came ...”

“... what you have got or can get, so long as you rightfully acquired it: where ‘rightfully’ often means not much more than ‘without breaking the law’, if that. Some philosophers see the disputes between such ideas as embodying two different views of society, which genuinely compete with each other and mobilise different ethical conceptions of ...”

“... the military? Of the poor Brits, we hear barely a squeak. It was the same when Major came to Camp David just before Christmas – he could as well have been travelling incognito. I think myself that Mrs Thatcher grew so sensitive to the cry of ‘Reagan’s poodle’ that she never failed to give tone and colour and visibility to the favours she undertook for ...”

“... Bubushkin is its lengthy sampling of Vera’s, very infrequently Igor’s, private diaries – a means of recovering the missing dates of the letter sequence, and so completing an historical record from 1921 to the composer’s death on 6 April 1971. Robert Craft tells us that Vera’s diaries if published entire would amount to a ‘book or books of great ...”

“... Hill’s need not exactly to spell but to articulate the word ‘atonement’ differently when he means at-one-ment is tacitly an admission that the two, the same and not the same, will always be magnetically held apart and held together by being like-poles. Kipling’s McAndrew discerned a Calvinistic predestination in ‘the stride o’ yon ...”

“... and as long as our environmental consciousness is tied to the idea of breathtaking scenery or David Attenborough’s ramblings about charismatic fauna, we will be satisfied with the preservation of beautiful symbols. Activists chain themselves to trees while Coca-Cola appeases guilty consciences by printing some arrows in a Möbius loop on the label of a ...”

“... intellectual inspiration Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1979. ‘Nobody knows what it actually means.’ Hayek was in no doubt that patterns emerged in the behaviour of populations, and might eventually lead to a form of large-scale self-organisation. The best way of ensuring this happened was to build a communications infrastructure that would make it ...”

“... into the UK, at least for a period of time. The nature of Britain’s economy and labour market means that immigration law cannot be cleanly separated from issues of employment, welfare, health and education. One of the dangers of the ‘hostile environment’ policy is that it deliberately collapses the distinction between judicial due process and ...”

“... Roger Williamson was burned to death at Zandvoort in 1973, while his friend and fellow driver David Purley tried desperately to beat out the flames as millions of TV viewers watched, Lauda was asked by the press why he hadn’t stopped to help. ‘I’m paid to race,’ he said, ‘not to stop.’ The ‘formula’ of F1 refers to the various rules ...”

“... not extravagantly lamented, when she was 15, Angelica early on became the pride, joy and main means of financial support of her father, Johann Joseph, an itinerant decorative painter. The family moved to Milan when Angelica was about 13 and she was soon turning out highly saleable copies of Old Masters. Her childhood, such as it was, like that of her ...”

“... the couplets in Catullus’ Latin. Compared to the deadpan opacity achieved by very similar means in the poem to Cicero, this protestation has an almost embarrassing straightforwardness that is anything but urbane. Catullus takes himself very seriously here, and calls on some very serious concepts, deeply engrained in Roman tradition. As with the note ...”

“... to address the pain. His partner, L., who is Spanish and ‘has a European sense of what it means to be ill’, urges him to see a doctor, but he refuses. The first summer of the Covid pandemic is not a time to go to the emergency room. And the narrator is wary of the American health system, where ‘doctors waste your money and your time, and send you ...”

“... how from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hundred generations’. This aim, he warns us, cannot be achieved without ...”

“... or fame exceeded their proven abilities. Wittgenstein, the mathematician Max Newman, the economist David Champernowne, von Neumann, Robin Gandy the logician, were men with whom he could be at ease, free of the social patina and the trappings of respectibility which repelled him. There are records of Turing’s participation in pre-war Cambridge, in ...”