“... In 1892 A.C. Benson published an essay which introduced the modern appreciation of Andrew Marvell. For more than two hundred years Marvell’s verse had shared with Metaphysical poetry a lowness of esteem which now seems puzzling. As the Cyclopaedia of English Literature explained in 1844, Marvel ‘is better known as a prose writer than a poet, and is still more celebrated as a patriotic member of parliament ...”

“... in play. One writer may be an accomplished biographer, but without any real expertise in the field in which their current subject worked. Another may be a fellow specialist working on the same material and issues as their subject, but lacking any cultivated familiarity with the sources and problems of modern intellectual history and unpractised at ...”

“... girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died of leukaemia. Despite his grief, the footballer stormed up the field, making 12 tackles in one game, before appearing on news programmes to talk about his heartbreak and to quote from the letters Lennay had written him during her terrible illness. Problem was: the girlfriend never existed. She was a complete invention ...”

“... was abolished. There were other jokes, equally bad but more ‘satirical’. At one point Field Marshal Earl Haig strode on, in bright red gloves: ‘As you all know, I have just this minute returned from the First World War. Indeed, so recently have I returned I haven’t had time to wash my hands.’ And much more in the same vein. The play was such ...”

“... see her. A cowless world, then, stretched round him on every side. Yet he had only to peep into a field, and, click! it would at once become radiant with bovine life.’ In his Life, P.N. Furbank takes Forster’s professions of inability to follow abstract arguments so seriously as to suggest that his inattention to the discussions ‘helps to explain, what ...”

“... showed some years ago, Shakespeare had links with a brewer of that name during his sojourn near St Andrew by the Wardrobe. Doubtless the Oxford editors felt that a single unfamiliar poem was as much as the public would swallow at once, but sagacious readers will instantly agree that the proximity of another plausibly Shakespearean poem surviving only from ...”

“... To be sold by Private Contract, the Right of the Next Presentation to the Vicarage of St Andrew, in the borough of Plymouth, in the County of Devon … upon the avoidance thereof of the present incumbent, who is nearly eighty years of age.’Navy jobs were given out by ships’ captains, who took on boys in the first instance as personal servants and ...”

“... reconciled decree,/Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,/Heaven, Hell, Earth, Chaos, all’, in Andrew Marvell’s famous summary. Yet this obsession with origins exists in tense competition with an insistent present: Paradise Lost was decades in the making, but in its final form it broods on the contemporary situation, the failure of the English ...”

“... unfounded. The issue was, however, destined to blow up in his face with the publication of Andrew Morton’s book on Diana which, though itself outside the Commission’s field of activity, was almost certain to be serialised in a newspaper and would in any case generate comment in the press. Once again McGregor was ...”

“... sacking of Washington DC, of course; the occasional instances of heroism (some of them mythical); Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British at New Orleans, fought after the peace treaty and so definitely pointless; and the fact that it gave rise to what later became the American national anthem (the words, not the tune, which was an old English drinking ...”

“... 5 July. A tweet announced that the president had accepted Pruitt’s resignation. His replacement, Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal lobbyist who can be trusted to keep a lower profile; he has slowed the pace of Pruitt’s anti-regulatory innovations, and in some cases sent a programme back for reassessment. In the reign of Trump, this is what we are learning ...”

“... with National Telecable, the US group which has strong disagreements with government policy in the field of fibre-optics, in which area Leigh had been involved when a minister. Nicholas Scott has consoled himself since his departure from office with a consultancy with Clark and Smith Industries, whose products include many aimed at the disabled, for whom Scott ...”

“... The Collected Essays and Criticism (1986). In effect, Greenberg’s onslaught has dominated the field of kitsch studies, so to speak, for the past sixty years. Olalquiaga herself describes Greenberg’s essay as ‘fundamental’ to the anti-kitsch position that she attempts to challenge in The Artificial Kingdom, writing now from a vantage-point that ...”

“... chewy, highly extracted flavours of black fruits, iron, earth and spicy wood’) with Andrew Jefford in the Financial Times on a Georges Duboeuf 2003 cru Beaujolais (‘This dark wine … helicopters into the mouth with spinning blades of intense fruit,’ combining ‘finesse and elegance with near-beefy depth’), or with the Wall Street Journal ...”

“... programme to create a super-race of horses through selective breeding of the descendants of Polish field horses and the now extinct tarpans.There were literary fantasies too. Byron’s poem ‘Mazeppa’ (1819) tells the story of a Ukrainian nobleman who cuckolded another count. When the affair is discovered, his punishment is to be strapped naked to the back ...”