“... Somozas and Castros will be replaced by Allendes, that larger numbers of people will lead longer, more leisured lives, and that we shall eventually get solar power and nuclear disarmament. For we are still thinking in a ‘liberal’ or ‘hegemonic’ or ‘scientistic’ or ‘technocratic’ or ‘rationalistic’ way. This way of thinking is, we are ...”

“... whenever ‘the people’s friend’ did get the chance to speak. Marat boasted that a crowd of more than two hundred thousand greeted his release from the Palais de Justice in April 1793, after being acquitted of inciting murder. Another observer guessed that it was more like seven or eight hundred ‘looters and ...”

“... Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the only authority quoted for it was his own Under the Greenwood Tree. This is an acute case of our dependence on dictionaries, and illustrates the commonest reason for resorting to them ...”

“... Dr McIntosh’s own exertions. She decided she could not understand Tudor Havering until she knew more about the Medieval baseline, and this is therefore her second book on Havering. One wishes more historians would follow this example. Yet, typically, the same things which make it so rewarding to study Havering make it ...”

“... But the seeming invincibility of the acrobats, and of Lilian Bland, is not guaranteed. What is more often up in the air, in Morrissey’s worried view, is the future, and specifically the future of children. ‘At the Balancing Lakes’ recalls a drowning child dragged out of the water and the awful moments before she miraculously vomits. In ‘The Singing ...”

“... incorporate Scotland led to incursions that have been forgotten, she argues, because of the later, more united history of the island. The 16th century saw the ‘erasure’ of Scotland from England’s idea of Britain, which was perceived as an extension of itself. Maps reduced Scotland to a coastal outline while such encyclopedic works as The Faerie Queene ...”

“... now her husband, as well as aide to Senator James Burden Day, whose daughter, Diana, was becoming, more and more, the center of Peter’s daydreams. Readers of the earlier novels will find such sentences irritating in part because they are familiar with the episodes alluded to; those who haven’t read them will find them ...”

“... only volume published in her lifetime and contained just seventeen poems, which makes it all the more remarkable that a few years later Knox could seize on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in ...”

“... policy prescriptions of Republicans and Federalists. Curiously, it is today’s Democrats who can more plausibly invoke an ideological lineage going back to the Republican Party of the 1790s, a radical organisation led by Thomas Jefferson. The first party system gave way around 1830 to the battles of the Whigs and the ...”

“... both in the practical sense that armies were sent frequently into battle, but also in the more amorphous sense that national identity was shaped by the memory of the Hundred Years War. Henry was highly conscious of the military achievements of his ancestors, especially Henry V, in France. He itched to fight, even in obese middle age: he had a huge ...”

“... New World is, by the same token, a ‘high concept’ novel, for its premise can be stated even more succinctly: ‘Tintin grows up.’ In Tuten’s hands (and with the personal blessing, we are told, of his friend and mentor Hergé), the cherub-faced, boundlessly intrepid teenager achieves a miraculous release from his forty-year pre-adolescence and is ...”

“... The more people feel that modern medicine has let them down, or at least has failed to live up to its own exalted expectations, the more alluring the prospect of looking to China as an alternative source of medical theory and practice. After all, China offers one of the very few medical traditions which continue to hold their own in the face of the hegemony of the Western medical model ...”

“... is no inner tension, no feeling incommunicable in any other way, as there is in Eliot or Edward Thomas, or even in such an apparently frivolous squib as Betjeman’s ‘ Death in Leamington’. Housman was unexpectedly benevolent about Blunden’s poetry and helped to get him an award from the Royal Literary Fund: but he was a little dry about it in ...”

“... and has refrained from chasing the metaphysical ignes fatui that bedevil so many of his ostensibly more ambitious pieces, he has scored some remarkable successes. Poems such as ‘Fetching Cows’, ‘Movements’ and ‘Notations of Ten Summer Minutes’, which aspire to be not much more than inventories of casual ...”

“... to ‘Greek religion’. The phrase first appeared in print in English in 1654; it became more common in the middle of the 18th century, and reached a peak of popularity in the 19th. This is of course a crude index (and the picture is subtly different in other European languages), but it’s a reminder that, whatever its deeper roots, religion as a ...”