“... Browne was a Laudian of the speculative, eirenic strain, akin in spirit to the intellectuals of Lord Falkland’s Great Tew Circle. The eirenic tendency – ‘I never could divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion,’ Browne writes – might look apolitical, but when push came to shove in 1642 such persons inclined to the king. During ...”

“... Blair could be pretty confident that his luck would hold. He knew, as we all know now, that Lord Hutton’s wheel was tilted heavily the government’s way. It was Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke of the BBC, foolishly trying to play Blair at his own game, who bet the farm, and lost. This risk-averse, high-stakes strategy is one of the things that set Blair ...”

“... of Seeing Things (1991) came out of bruising rounds of academic labour and the hurly-burly of home life. Even the cottage in Glanmore became a problem as Heaney’s family grew and grew up. To one of his touchiest correspondents, the poet John Montague, he confessed in 1976: ‘I’m in a furious mess over the housing question. This place is a hellhole ...”

“... around has always been precarious. In June 1652 Katherine Singard told of walking eight miles home to Great Budworth, Cheshire, carrying a sack of meal on her head. She stopped off in an alehouse to ‘beg some small drink’. The Experience of Work is valuable precisely because it offers a view of the early modern economy that isn’t defined by ...”

“... Of the life of this world But the things that endure, Good Deeds, are best In the sight of the Lord. The montage is touching and grotesque: the simple pieties of the Koran in jarring contrast with the crude mock-up of the dead couple in their wedding finery. Who could have dreamed up such a folly? The Di Castro Travel Agency, according to an engraved ...”

“... and small beads, so that if an end-result is a very small bead – the governor in a Swiss rest-home – it is grotesquely out of proportion with the horrors that had led up to it. Much of this appearance of logic is due to the device of the supposedly objective narrator used here by Dostoevsky. In Crime and Punishment, the reader was mostly inside ...”

“... the first Modernists had, was less eclectic in his literary tastes and sources, and much more at home in a domestic English landscape and history. He did, however, have a strong intuition of the unreliability of the shelter which all of this offered, and while he naturally cherished it, he had a strong urge to divest himself of it.He was hungering for a ...”

“... probably reinforced the sense that such songs had a worthy place in musical evenings at home. From about this time the sheet music is often advertised in the form of a part-song for soprano, contralto, tenor and bass, and it seems clear from the very large number of advertisements for the music thus arranged that the song was frequently performed ...”

“... at all in this world, is to see that boy.’ The body keeps waiting, she explains, for him to come home, listens for his sounds, awaits his imprint on the air in Chelsea colours. Hopeless desire, then, and what it would look like for it not to be hopeless. Byatt would not go so far in fiction as to have the ghost appear to the mother, who is ...”

“... hobble. When not on the phone, Sam talked into thin air, addressing himself. ‘Why did the Good Lord bring Hurricane Katrina?’ he asked. ‘Man, it’s life, it’s evolution. Shit happens. But the thing that matters is what you do about it as a person. If some guy comes to rape my wife, why, this is America: I’m gonna put a cap in his ass. I’m gonna ...”

“... can treat the patient for £1600, it keeps the difference. The incentive to send the patient home as soon as possible is high. Under the new system, state money will ‘follow the patient’ wherever the patient chooses to take it, even when that is outside the NHS. Patients with chronic conditions like diabetes will increasingly be given, not ...”

“... he didn’t dislike them. I think I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after Home and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He’s the ideal author … never says a word!’ In Chariots of Fire he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed ...”

“... their respective nuclear arsenals. Thatcher used the promise of this event to drive her message home. Reagan, she insisted, could negotiate because he started from a position of strength. Kinnock’s strategy would toss all that away, or at least Britain’s chance of playing any meaningful role in the discussions. ‘Does anyone imagine that Mr Gorbachev ...”

“... as Mary Rowlandson did, reflecting on her past torments and ‘the awful dispensation of the Lord towards us’.A sanitised version of the captivity narrative, shorn of Rowlandson’s reflections, became the official story of post-9/11 America, as constructed by its leaders: the American people would be freed from their helpless vulnerability by ...”

“... to this pageantry. With trepidation I asked a friend of mine whose judgment I trusted, a young lord, shortly to be killed, what I should do about all this. He said that if my family, which had evacuated itself, had no permanent address, it would be hard to get into the Brigade of Guards, but he strongly advised me to apply to the Inniskilling Dragoon ...”