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“... ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish ...”

“... is among the wonders of English poetry, comparable only to that of his greatest poetic hero, John Keats, who inevitably features in the list of luminaries with whom Owen compares Sassoon in a particularly excessive epistolary tribute:Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as Keats ...”

“... had been the chairman of Eurotunnel, was appointed to run the Strategic Rail Authority, created by John Prescott in 1999 to give direction to the privatised industry. Morton commissioned a report from Atkins and Ernst & Young to assess whether there was a need for such a line. By the time they reported in 2003, Morton – who was too outspoken to occupy such a ...”

“... before leaving the town: ‘This is to give notice to all the World that Andrew Tucker and his son John Tucker are Clowns, and Cowards.’ It is his earliest extant manuscript, and is reproduced here along with the portrait of Sarah Andrew. Such episodes, taken from local archives and legal records, are among the best things in the book, though part of the ...”

“... as an interpolation since ancient times, and by modern scholars almost unanimously: it has major inconsistencies with the rest of the Iliad, its style is different, and it can be excised without leaving a trace.’ Each contention has some merit, yet the exclusion of Book 10 still amounts to an extreme case of chutzbris – chutzpah for ...”

“... in 1947, at the age of 74, made sure that all of her private papers were burned. About the two major emotional relationships of her life – the first with Isabelle McClung, a Pittsburgh heiress and the beloved ‘best companion’ to whom she dedicated The Song of the Lark; the second with Edith Lewis, a fellow spinster from Nebraska with whom she lived ...”

“... Rilke in the early 20th, dozens thereafter. Starting later, effectively in the interwar period, major work dispensing with characters became a regular feature of the literary landscape, from The Trial to La Nausée onwards: Beckett, Borges, Gracq, Calvino and others. Proust, however, disavowed neither, innovating rather than abolishing them, as he saw ...”

“... you live. We have, I realise, an inadequate way of thinking about intimidation. Either there is John Stuart Mill Man making up his private mind or someone with a gun at his head being told to ‘vote my way or else.’ But the dominant Third World alternative is that of the ‘mobilised community’. Living in crowded townships or squatter camps, Africans ...”

“... positive way, but was celebrating spirit. Moreover, the central text where spirit begins to play a major rhetorical role is Heidegger’s rectorship Address of 1933, when he took over the leadership of his university. This failure to avoid speaking of spirit is not remarked on by Heidegger. Derrida considers whether Heidegger’s inconsistencies are ...”

“... but even here his illuminating suggestions must be weighed against the distinguished essay by John Creaser in the Lindley volume which points, heretically and convincingly, to the ‘royalism’ of Comus, or at least of the occasion for which it was written. The radicals were apparently against ‘authoritarianism’ – but who was more authoritarian ...”

“... others have covered it adequately, but he is not short of material, having had access to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library (where Hadley’s letters, alas without Ernest’s thousandfold replies, are stored) and many other major collections; indeed all the biographers appear to have been received with unusual ...”

“... sometimes quite unlikely clients – the early career of Salvador Allende appears to have been a major beneficiary. Even by the late Forties, however, the focus of SDECE attention had shifted to the colonies. It was here, especially in Indochina, Black Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, that the SDECE found its true focus and built up formidable ...”

“... are much more direct attempts to meet the challenge Byron makes to the literary critic. If he is a major poet, as not merely his reputation but the size and scope of his oeuvre insistently suggest, which are the great works? How far should we forgive his low view of poetry and his negligence as a craftsman? For Anglophone critics of Byron, led in our ...”

“... the Government in Rome started a trade war with France, Italy’s chief trading partner, causing a major depression and a string of bankruptcies in the South. ‘The agricultural products to be given protection, rice, sugar and hemp, came almost entirely from Northern Italy, whereas such wheat as was grown in the South was more for subsistence than for ...”

“... Ancient Greek classes in his first year – an hour a day, every day – and soon switched his major from pre-law to Greek. In 1922 he met Marian Thanhouser in the classics library. She was three years older than him but had started at Berkeley late because of illness. She grew up in Milwaukee, where her maternal grandfather owned a department store ...”