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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... their families with the grisly truth about life at the Front. By the time Wilfred Owen’s savage poems of disillusionment were published the war was over, the author a voice crying from the grave. One understands well why the poetry of the latter stages of the war is so painfully claustrophobic: it is as if the fagging, the boredom, the arbitrary ...”

“... of the hacks whom Pope had skewered with malicious wit in the Dunciad. Their archetype was Richard Savage, whose profligate life Dr Johnson – himself an industrious, ill-paid hack in his earlier years in London – had narrated in 1744. The Grub Street the Victorians knew was the far-off one described by Smollett in his novels and, in their own day, in ...”

“... hero; Agustín de Iturbide, the Mexican; Emperor Pedro I of Brazil; and, finally, Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, the astonishing Scottish maverick who played a key part in the liberation of Peru and the consolidation of Brazilian independence. It was not fashionable in the later 20th century to see history in terms of its great men. Yet however ...”

“... were just unusually aggressive, even by the high standards of Roman and post-Roman Europe. In 1689 Thomas Bartholinus the Younger published his compilation of excerpts from the poems and sagas in an attempt to explain ‘the contempt for death among the still pagan Danes’. He concluded that their endemic fearlessness was powered by a religion and an ethos ...”

“... by the maths master. In less than fifteen years, Vaughan – who had been a favourite pupil of Thomas Arnold at Rugby – transformed the school, spiritually, sanitarily and commercially. He raised money for a fashionable chapel by George Gilbert Scott as well as new boarding houses, decently appointed and, from the mid-1850s, complete with water ...”

“... served (Adrien Brody, Ben Chaplin, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Sean Penn, John C. Reilly, John Savage, John Travolta), though some were filmed and then dropped (Bill Pullman, Mickey Rourke). George Clooney was cast, scripted, shot and widely promoted, but he was on screen for just 83 seconds. In an army of a million stories we are not expected to take any ...”