“... Last May​ , I was invited to the Ministry of Justice to take part in a discussion of ‘Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation’ (Slapps): legal cases whose purpose is to harass, intimidate and silence public criticism. I was ushered into a small, airless room with a group of other journalists and civil servants ...”

“... to say the least – especially since the Blake of the Visions of the Daughters of Albion may justifiably be claimed as a sister to Mary Wollstonecraft in the struggle to vindicate the rights of woman. And, most alarmingly in a book that advertises itself as a guide to the poetry as well as the life, it completely misses the point of the poem, which ...”

“... people, is that one day, through the creation of free institutions with sovereign power, Europe may once again cover its true geographical, and even more important, historical dimensions.’ He wants nothing less than a restoration of the Holy Roman Empire, and, in the absence of any obvious candidate for the Imperial Throne, it is clear that in his mind ...”

“... a long and distinguished pedigree this analysis has. It is perhaps the most celebrated part of Robert Michels’s Political Parties (originally published in 1911) – ‘who says organisation says oligarchy’ – and self-recruiting oligarchies were, Michels believed, a tendency intrinsic to all modern democratic parties. Defeat from the Jaws of Victory ...”

“... the fold through the baptismal ceremony, he was engaged on his master’s business much as, we may recall in Luke 2.49, this self-same master at age 12 found lagging behind at the temple in Jerusalem by his anxious parents, rebuked them saying ‘Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’ and not, in the word of a later English ...”

“... Germany and the Americas; its characters a Croatian Catholic priest called Draganovic and Major Robert d’Aubuisson of Salvador. If British involvement and documentation seem minimal, this may simply be because that famous repository of guilty secrets, the Foreign Office, ‘deliberated for six months, then announced ...”

“... nine times more on repairing its town hall than it did on building up its coastal defences. This may have been criminal complacency, but Liverpool’s élite was manifestly not quaking in its shoes at the bogeyman of French-inspired insurrection. Wishful thinking is the occupational disease of all would-be revolutionaries; and one suspects that those ...”

“... himself with Christ’. Certainly he inclined to treat Popes as vicars of Michelangelo. It may well be his own account of his mission, given narrative form by the fantasy underlying it, that Vasari recorded as a mini-myth which is in essence a de-Christianised and non-blasphemous version of the myth of the incarnation. Dr Liebert remarks that, after ...”

“... of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on. Many ...”

“... If anxiety about identity too often stands in for actual drama in his fiction, for some it may be a preferable substitute. Dressing all this up in Raymond Carver’s clothes offers the prospect of an accessible synthesis. Of the collection’s title story, Schiff said: ‘Here Englander may just surpass the ...”

“... who have conventionally been regarded, with Suckling and Carew, as principal ‘Cavalier’ poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for ...”

“... mustn’t come about as the result of an accident, but must involve fate or providence, which may in turn require the presence of numinous powers. W.B. Yeats could see nothing tragic about a car crash. Pure contingency – falling drunkenly from a fifth-floor window, for example – lacks the grandeur of the tragic. The protagonist must be of high social ...”

“... European empires, while many dreamed of an extra-European empire of their own. In 1684, Robert Barclay, an Aberdeenshire Quaker, founded his own settlement in east New Jersey; and in 1698, perhaps a quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital was expended on the Darien Scheme, an abortive attempt to establish a colony in Central America. After this ...”

“... the 19th-century novel itself is perhaps the most important. As Pew and Silver tell it, Robert Louis Stevenson visits Dark at the lighthouse and gets drunkenly loquacious on the subject of man’s shadowy inner self. When Dark discovers an evolutionist’s treasure trove of fossils, he becomes the embodiment of post-Darwinian angst, and Darwin ...”

“... the thoughtful exploration of his life and work currently on display at Pallant House (until 10 May). Today Nicholson is more known about than known. Some works – his child unfriendly Alphabet (B is for Beggar, U is for Urchin), the illustrations for The Velveteen Rabbit and the portrait of him in his favourite spotted dressing gown by William Orpen ...”