“... Perhaps. But the following things really happened. President Kennedy was shot down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy ...”

“... wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to say, was working from a subtext of his own: Hazlitt’s crimes against ...”

“... for public attention, rather than acting as the spokesmen for inherently incompatible values. William Wordsworth, whose essays and prefaces originated much of the rhetoric of high-cultural debate, distinguishes between a taste for poetry – which involves active mental participation by the reader – and one for ‘rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or ...”

“... from European history conventionally understood. Instead, imperial history should be massively broad and always eclectic. It should involve national, European and non-European histories being studied and written about in parallel, so that we may better understand how different parts of the globe have interacted with each other over time. But here of course ...”

“... sovereignty and national dignity – why did they continue to ignore Iran? He was supported by a broad coalition of new Asian countries. Even the delegate from Taiwan, which had been given its seat in the UN at the expense of Mao’s People’s Republic of China, reminded the British that ‘the day has passed when the control of the Iranian oil industry can ...”

“... went on exhibition at the Tate. Then Hirst won the Turner Prize. According to one of the jury, William Feaver, who is quoted by Spalding, this was ‘for panache and effrontery ... He has been the leading brainstormer of his generation of artists, a goad and corrective, showing up the solemnity of professional art curators while demonstrating that art’s ...”

“... of 19th-century Britain: second and favourite son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, brother of Matthew and William Delafield Arnold, brother-in-law of W.E. Forster, father of Mrs Humphry Ward, grandfather of Julian and Aldous Huxley and of Mrs G.M. Trevelyan. His knockabout career helped enlarge his connections. At Oxford he stood on even closer terms of friendship ...”

“... of ‘three kinds of experience and inquiry’: visual, anthropological ‘or cultural in the broad sense’, and speculative. He is quite serious and also mildly mocking. These experiences matter, and mingle interestingly in the text. Calvino, one of the most inventive and thoughtful of writers, has been working (and playing) for years with the uses we ...”

“... consideration of relationships between speech-community and society. Consequently the book has two broad lessons to teach. It will tell native Britons that their ancestral claims to the English tongue are of no greater moment than the settlers’ rights of Americans, Australians, Indians, Africans, or indeed any of the speakers of the ‘new Englishes’ which ...”

“... Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of Bombay; Thomas Olivers (‘The God of Abraham praise’), a ...”

“... political life. Is there a connection with the French Revolution?In responding to this question, William Sewell is attempting something quite different from a replay of past disputes. Although old enough to have participated in those disputes, he largely sidestepped them at the time. He made his reputation in 1980 with a brilliantly inventive book called ...”

“... of Independence. But then, Emerson never did feel great kinship with vanguard abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, much less with aspiring literary women like Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who brought the injustices of slavery home to ordinary American readers. When, in 1850, Emerson came to support anti-slavery, he did so more from ...”

“... father of lies’) who was actually the first ethnographer, had a quite exceptionally ‘broad and non-judgmental’ view of ethnic identity, based on culture rather than biology. His perspective, Geary writes, was ‘pre-Orientalist’: he refused ‘to denigrate the customs of others’. His successors, on the other hand, especially in the Roman ...”

“... to immigration to pornography. A forthcoming essay collection edited by Ryan Johnson and William Cohen will be entitled Filth. The interest in ‘waste-theory’ may be seen as a recyclable and non-biodegradable byproduct of a number of related tendencies in contemporary literary studies: 1) the borrowing of critical paradigms from science and social ...”

“... of her own about interior decoration and dress reform. With her dark hair piled up under a broad-brimmed hat, high-waisted silk dress and velvet cloak, she looks in a photograph as if she is sitting for Klimt. The couple came to England in 1896, when Muthesius was given a post as technical attaché to the German Embassy with a brief to report back to ...”