“... incidentally, impossible to square with ‘ardour’): one of Keats’s ‘splendid letters’, Herbert as a ‘splendid’ reader of his own poems, the ‘splendid’ Parisian light, that ‘splendid’ disease known as inspiration. I don’t think it’s a ‘translation issue’ either. (But a note in any case on the translations: I don’t read ...”

“... rumours of the plague. It then moves to a review of previous English dictionaries, beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explains ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ borrowed from Latin and other languages, some now obsolete, others, such as sacerdotal, now well established despite Winchester’s comment to the contrary; and why ...”

“... until 1921, almost a decade after he had begun working on the plans for New Delhi. Lutyens and Herbert Baker, who had also been a pupil of Ernest George and Harold Peto’s many years before, were jointly appointed to this huge task, which would become a sour professional (and personal) battle and win them both knighthoods. The siting and designing of the ...”

“... without noticing it. The first European to discover the Mississippi from the sea was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was assisted by local Indian guides in 1682. On a riverbank several days upstream La Salle shouted ‘Vive le Roi!’ and claimed the Mississippi Basin for Louis XIV. He named the vast territory, amounting to a third of the ...”

“... conducted by the Jesuits in the Italian countryside were religious versions of carnival (just as Robert Burns, describing revivalist religion in 18th-century Ayrshire, wrote of ‘holy fairs’), and the missioners enjoyed the status of modern pop stars. But the more distant missions taken to the Americas and Asia were fatally compromised by the ‘European ...”

“... and distinctive talent. Gerard Manley Hopkins thought the author might be Irish, observing to Robert Bridges in 1885 that ‘Field is a common, Michael a very common, Irish name.’ Bradley triumphantly reported that at least one reader was convinced that Field must be ‘a Bristol man’. Privately, the authors called themselves ...”

“... is to be held and done in common; nobody is to be unwillingly obeyed; in the sunlight of what Robert Burns called ‘social love’, human beings return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our ...”

“... The welfare state became the warfare state – an outcome Roosevelt neither foresaw nor desired. Robert Dallek is troubled by the absence of leadership in contemporary American politics, and his biography of FDR is meant to show us what the real thing looks like. ‘In this time of demoralisation,’ he writes, ‘it seems well to remind Americans that the ...”

“... Dan Bern. His parents moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa, where Bern was born, round about the time that Robert Zimmerman started calling himself Bob Dylan and left Hibbing, Minnesota, to head circuitously east for New York City. Where Bern stands in relation to Dylan isn’t straightforward. He isn’t anything so crude as a tribute act: he performs his own ...”

“... that they became childlike, irresponsible, dependent. A contrasting analysis was offered by Herbert Gutman, who argued in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom that stable marriage was the dominant institution during slavery, and for at least a short period after emancipation. John Blessingame followed this more optimistic line of argument even ...”

“... worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and ...”

“... Some of the most interesting and best-researched work in this field, like the studies by Robert Nye and Susanna Barrows, is scrupulous to avoid both the reduction of crowds to mythology and the perpetuation of élitist generalisations about so-called mass society and its inevitable horror, mediocrity or vulgarity. It is a difficult position to ...”

“... statist designs of the New Deal, the New York World’s Fair, Nazi Germany and the urban plans of Robert Moses, meant to confirm leftist suspicions that the Western democracies are proto-fascist. Nonetheless, Hart’s novelistic treatment of 1940 reveals a wild grain in his conservatism, a sympathy with maverick energies that has occasionally disturbed the ...”

“... society. There is a terse prose-poem, ‘Pan Cogito’s Thoughts on Hell’, in which Zbigniew Herbert gives a parbolic account of such an artist’s position: ‘Contrary to popular belief, the lowest circle of hell is not inhabited either by despots, matricides or those who are seekers after flesh. It is a refuge for artists, full of mirrors, pictures ...”

“... in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and foreign, and which were more ...”