“... political ferment in European history, from the Twelve Articles of the German peasants in 1525 to William Blake. Yet Warr is emphatic on the need for a spiritual reading of what Sedley and Kaplan want to read materially: ‘These administrations [of law, gospel and spirit] are of a spiritual, not chronical, consideration, and are not distinguished by fleshly ...”

“... laid in the mortar crudely,harsh lines stripe the entrance steps,and like a double-exposure the broad white hatof its pastor, his furiously serious face, drab suit,almost appear for us in the archway.That’s John Chilembwe:he seems to absorb all the light.But, you say from your future,he was shot on a hillsideafter his followers had removed the headfrom ...”

“... but they make few, if any, concessions to the inexpert reader. A good working knowledge of the broad outlines of Polish history is highly desirable. But the sheer scale of pre-war Polish Jewry will be evident to any reader of these books. The Jews of Poland, of whom there were three and a half million, represented the second largest Jewish community in the ...”

“... my attempts to turn myself into many different types of readers have resulted in a broad range of commentary.’ Østermark-Johansen is one of few scholars today who can command anything like the range of languages that was usual in Pater’s lifetime. She was educated in Denmark; the UK’s monoglot education will produce fewer and fewer ...”

“... he lists Henry Vanderborcht, John Vander-heydon, Adrian Van-Diest, Sir Anthony Vandyck, William Vander-velde, Francis Vanzoon, Herman Verelst and F. de Vorsterman, and with a little more diligence he could easily have doubled this collection of foreign Englishmen. Of the 106 painters accorded a biographical sketch by Buckeridge, 55 were immigrants ...”

“... Van Dine’s famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that ...”

“... family reader. As will be evident, BLM’s definition of what constitutes a literary magazine is broad, verging on indiscriminate. Woman’s World and Vanity Fair gain entry, as does Rhythm (although the editors have generally steered prudently clear of little magazines). Journals like the Contemporary Review which snootily considered themselves above ...”

“... in a more complex and satisfying way than journalism ever could. A copyright note records that William Boyd’s 13 stories originally appeared in sites as diverse as the London Magazine, Mayfair (a down-market, English Playboy), Punch and on Radio 4’s Morning Story. Teasingly, the acknowledgment doesn’t tell us which story belongs where. But it is safe ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... political thought – not only Jeremy Bentham, but also his friend John Lind and the clergyman William Paley, whose Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) had gone through fifteen editions by the time of his death in 1805. The natural jurists’ arguments were soon interwoven with a more traditional political theology that emphasised Christian ...”

“... turned ankle, rather than a fat, self-indulgent tyrant; Elizabeth not trusting anyone. In 1563 William Cecil drafted a decree demanding that she be content that some special cunning painter might be permitted by access to her Majesty to take the natural representation of her Majesty whereof she hath always been of her own will and disposition very ...”

“... of Pat Buchanan, the neolithic challenger to George Bush’s renomination in 1992, and William Buckley, the acidulous Catholic pundit, while making us uncomfortable about longstanding liberal assumptions? This brief volume is not an intellectual ‘life review’, to borrow a gerontological term, but a solemn reflection on the philosophical ...”

“... interested in how the transition from the actual to the utopian is made, in contrast with William Morris’s News from Nowhere, which, as Perry Anderson has noted, is that rarest of socialist utopias, one which describes in some detail how the revolution actually came about. Nor are they especially interested in what their utopias look like. The ...”

“... a degree of consciousness and concentration which the very best stories don’t seem to have. William Gass rationally observed that the story ‘is a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential.’ That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett ...”

“... by the 19th-century forgers were more sophisticated, though less celebrated, than those with which William Henry Ireland in the previous century had deceived James Boswell and many others, though not the great Shakespearean Edmond Malone (himself guilty of tampering with manuscripts). The men of this new age were scholars, working in a tradition often said to ...”