“... contained a variety of small worlds, in Lancashire as different as Bolton. ‘the Geneva of the North’, and the coastal Fylde, in 1600 as Popish as Ireland. It has been a widespread assumption that the true story of the English Reformation, an accurate account of its pace, progress and ultimate profundity, will consist of the sum of these many parts, the ...”

“... filtered through Harvard and America. Seeing things is Heaney’s most ‘Irish’ book since North. While seeming to hark back to the whole of his career and to resume it – the seaboard and rustic settings and subjects, the translations from Dante and Virgil that frame it, the elegies for dead friends, the poems about driving and fishing (it is also ...”

“... Goldwater and interned in the Nixon White House. He made his career talking up threats from Iran, North Korea and Venezuela to fill the void left by the Soviet Union. He has consistently urged US policymakers to take the hardest possible line, up to and including military action, even as such interventions have become less and less popular in the aftermath of ...”

“... view which is much more congenial to him. James I in particular is not a favourite of his. Unlike Elizabeth, James relished Lord Henry Howard’s ‘unctuous brand of flattery’. He also had a penchant for beautiful young men. Ashton makes no moral judgment about their gender, but he is very critical of the fact that, unlike ...”

“... That the English have been slow to recognise James Merrill as the best poet in the language after Elizabeth Bishop has long seemed strange to Americans. Come to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic ...”

“... anyone who needs reminding how much they have contributed to its literature. Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Martha Gellhorn, Natalia Ginzburg, Shirley Hazzard, Doris Lessing and many other women writers are here (but not Anne Frank or Hannah Arendt), and among the more unexpected selections are the reminiscences of Soviet ...”

“... to Horace Walpole; the Countess of Belvidere, after her imprisonment in Ireland for adultery; Lady Elizabeth Foster, mistress of the Duke of Devonshire and bosom friend of his Duchess; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was drawn to Italy by her love for the ambidextrous Francesco Algarotti and then took up with a Brescian count who swindled her; the free-thinking ...”

“... serve to illuminate unjustifiable anomalies in British politics, such as higher spending per head north of the border and the right of Scottish MPs at Westminster to vote on specifically English legislation. These unfairnesses would not go down well with Middle England, and would almost certainly bring about an English nationalist backlash. Scottish ...”

“... In February the Senate established a committee, chaired by Sam Ervin, a Democrat from North Carolina, to investigate Watergate and other campaign abuses. The judge in the trial of the Watergate burglars, ‘Maximum John’ Sirica, also aired his suspicions that the whole story had still not been told. Faced with the prospect of a lengthy ...”

“... fleeing to California at the expense of an as yet unknown young Canadian admirer called Elizabeth Smart. Smart had read Barker’s poems and fallen in love with their author at a distance, determining in advance to bear him children on the grounds that they ‘would all be wonderful poets’. Her fixation might have been harmless if she hadn’t had ...”

“... fate is here dismissed in a sentence: ‘the great invasion fleet … foundered uselessly in the North Sea.’ No mention of Drake and the fireships, let alone the bowls on Plymouth Hoe. Nor is there a word about the further Armadas that Philip sent against England in 1596 and 1597, nor about Drake’s disastrous counter-Armada to La Coruña in 1589, which ...”

“... an evaluation of its chances involves understanding the problems and aims of Cardinal Fleury and Elizabeth Farnese. Even though the exploration of English Jacobitism in this book is superficial, the European dimension makes it a great deal more than the exploration of an anachronistic quirk of Scottish history. It is natural that this book, while ostensibly ...”

“... had triumphed in Worcestershire, but Mary died only a year after Dean Hawford. Her successor, Elizabeth I, once more turned religion to Protestantism, including the closure of the few monasteries, nunneries and friaries that Mary’s Catholic restoration had begun to coax back into life. The dissolution of the monasteries is an old tale oft told: the ...”

“... of Hutcheson and the Ulster Enlightenment of the 18th century is what is now needed both south and north of the border. He might have added that it was the Union that effectively extinguished it. ‘Heathcliff and the Great Hunger’ is the title of Eagleton’s first chapter, but it is not sufficiently indicative of the book as a whole. It inserts Brontë’s ...”

“... distract sailors or bring bad luck at sea – which was just as well, because a topless carving of Elizabeth Fry or Florence Nightingale would certainly have been frowned on. Fry, who adorned a Victorian merchant ship, is depicted wearing a piecrust-collar shirt and bulky masculine jacket; Nightingale, from a similar vessel, has a capable-looking face with ...”