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“... his nonsense about cannibals in Australia. In much the same class was his contemporary, A. Henry Savage Landor, grandson of the poet. As a boy he half-hanged himself, which, as Keay remarks, was excellent training for being towed by the throat behind Tibetan ponies. Worse things than that supposedly happened to him in the Himalayas, where he ‘took to heart ...”

“... As Martines shows, churches were by no means off-limits as locations for murder: the slaying of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral might have passed almost without notice in Italy. Indeed, the Pazzi chose as their signal to act the moment when Cardinal Riario elevated the Host: that is, the precise instant when, according to the Catholic faith that ...”

“... sitting in hot sunshine outside a café in Taormina, supposedly researching his subject’s ‘savage pilgrimage’ but actually getting on with what turns out to be the book’s real business, which is to obsess at length about what he himself, writer, flâneur, free-floating stoner, is supposedly doing with his life. He envies them sometimes, ‘those ...”

“... city into a network of inscrutable canyons), one developed new bare alert senses, with their own savage warnings and notations.’ The Heat of the Day, one of her best novels, is the product of these years and is redolent of that heightened perception generated by a civilians’ war in which the domestic and the familiar were constantly transformed into ...”

“... It was Roman intervention that had ensured ‘the society of civill life’ and ‘chased away all savage barbarisme from the Britans minds’. The result was the creation of a new identity. ‘And meet it is we should beleeve, that the Britans and Romans in so many ages, by a blessed and joyfull mutuall ingrafting, as it were, have growen into one stocke and ...”

“... this bucolic setting he soon abandoned his Romantic inclinations and developed in their place ‘a savage hatred of wealth’. He joined the local chapter of the newly founded Socialist Party of America and over the next few years became obsessed with the idea of using fiction to convert the American public to the cause.Sinclair’s first serious attempt at ...”

“... feedback’: Auden brings back forms and metres ‘in chic contemporary guise’; Dylan Thomas causes ‘a blockage against intelligence’; even ‘the Movement’ itself – the incisively intelligent ‘academic-administrative’ verses of Larkin, Wain and Enright – could not help endorsing the most negative feedback of all – English ...”

“... living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of itself,’ he says in his Study of Thomas Hardy, a sentiment which might have been uttered by John Stuart Mill himself. But what Lawrence meant by ‘self’ was not to be confused with the ‘cheap egotism’ of the ‘self-conscious little ego’ described by modern individualism. ‘I know that ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...”

“... the idea of a seat, and appropriate a whole country to the mansion’, as his contemporary Thomas Whately put it. Brown was attacked as a result, directly by Cowper in The Task and implicitly by Goldsmith in The Deserted Village. Yet his life also tells the opposite story of the considerable social mobility available to the educated Georgian ...”

“... he reveals his name, and even this arch literary empiricist curiously insists that his first name, Thomas (rather than his surname), is the real sign that he is a person of no nonsense: ‘You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all ...”

“... them, in a racist dramaturgy that produces tragic destruction.Twelfth Night’s other neighbour is Thomas More, the probably unperformed manuscript play by many hands on which more than one theatre company seems to have worked, fitfully, over several years. John Jowett’s Arden edition brilliantly re-dated the play from the 1590s to 1600-04, with Hand ...”

“... the mid-1730s lobbied theatre managements to stage more Shakespeare; she had also encouraged Sir Thomas Hanmer, a former Speaker of the House of Commons, to prepare the Oxford edition of Shakespeare published in 1744, with a picture of the Westminster Abbey statue as a frontispiece. Nor were her artistic interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the ...”

“... remarked) resembled ‘growing potatoes in a cellar’, wild and motherless, neglected by their savage and withdrawn father, cut off in their remote Yorkshire parsonage from all civilised pleasures and practices, the interests of the girls sacrificed to those of their worthless brother. Charlotte’s role in this version of things was that of designated ...”

“... to publish a definitive, ten-volume edition of Burke’s correspondence, supervised by the late Thomas Copeland. And since 1981, the Clarendon Press has been publishing Burke’s writings and speeches under the overall editorship of Paul Langford, the first systematically new edition since that compiled between 1792 and 1827. No one reading these genuinely ...”