“... is, at best, fruitless egoism. This doctrine, which would have been music to the ears of Elizabeth I, had some distinguished adherents. The period of Lipsius’s life and influence is the period of the external conservatism and internal radicalism of Montaigne and of Bacon. It is also the period of the Family of Love, the heretical sect with which ...”

“... scare, were, in fact, unable to produce any examples of heretical thought except an errant bishop in France. (William Forbes, who has been casually labelled Arminianist by some modern historians, seems to have been imbued with medieval Augustinianism.) ‘Arminian’ was a useful term of abuse and, along with accusations of incest and ...”

“... optimism being transmuted into varying forms of cautious hauteur in the writing of Jeffers, Frost, Bishop and Lowell. Paulin’s preference runs to the ‘palefaces’, but he includes samples from Blues singers, ‘the most authentic American political poets’. Finally, Paulin finds some room for the ‘anti-political tradition’. As he goes on to ...”

“... Menalcas, the shepherd in Virgil’s Eclogues. Theodulf, the Spanish theologian and future bishop, evoked ‘Menalcas coming from his apple-rich estate./ He wipes the sweat from his forehead,/ enters supported by battalions of bakers and cooks,/and ius synodale gerit’ (‘he presides over the company’s good manners’ or over its ‘sauce’: both ...”

“... as Ireland. There, Petronilla de Meath ended up on the losing side in a power struggle with the bishop of Ossory, and was burned to death after being tortured into confessing she was a ‘heretic sorcerer’. The fusion of witchcraft and heresy served to demonise religious dissent. In the 1420s there were campaigns against homicidal devil-worshipping women ...”

“... much, and whether there was anything in my room for ten or twenty dollars.’ With the help of a bishop and a kind friend, she applies for financial aid, and realises that she is now a ‘Commie’, the sort of term her father uses for those who accept help from the state. She uses the money to pay her rent, buy textbooks and get a new Sunday dress: ‘I ...”

“... at Magdalene) became known chiefly for its trove of 17th-century ballads, which supplied Bishop Percy with material for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Pepys himself was remembered, if at all, as a naval administrator who’d had a compulsion for buying up printed paper. The library’s catalogue – it wasn’t a secret – listed six ...”

“... of Giordano Bruno, Hill seems to have promoted a little-known rebellion on the death of Queen Elizabeth, a doomed and farcical adventure apparently intended to establish, on the unpromising soil of Lundy Island, a Utopian republic akin to that planned by his contemporary Tommaso Campanella in southern Italy. The concluding essay, on the relationship of ...”

“... rough divides between poems of here and elsewhere (a pattern which has become familiar since Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel), This Other Life is in five parts, with One, Three, and Five set in Britain and Two and Four in Italy. Within this oscillating progression, journeys abroad may involve returns (hence the first Italian poem is ...”

“... were imposed on the textiles India produced, and cheap British cottons flooded the Indian market. Bishop Heber, that acute observer and author of the lines ‘though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile’, reported that ‘the peasantry in the Company’s provinces are, on the whole, worse off, poorer and more dispirited than the subjects of the ...”

“... theatrical, for it inescapably carries a memory of Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’. However, as Elizabeth Story Donno points out in her edition of Marvell, Milton uses the word in his 1642 An Apology for Smectymnus: ‘it has no rubric to be sung in an antic cope upon the stage of a high altar.’ The phrase denotes a ‘grotesque ecclesiastical ...”

“... passages to the king: ‘In such places as the Author touches anything concerning the Bishop of Rome, I have noted it with a hand or words in the margin to the intent it should be in a readiness to you at all times in the reading.’ There is something of the wistful armchair traveller about Lord Morley, an Italophile who had never made it to ...”

“... a piece in the New Statesman about Ezra Pound. It was very lively so he was recruited.He wrote on Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Wilbur for the ‘Review’. And on Lowell?No, I don’t think on Lowell, but he wrote well on those two and others. He wrote various things in the later issues. I’d certainly moved to London by then. We’d published about, I ...”

“... in 1969. The success of Sinn Féin in the May elections added fuel to the fire, while the death of Elizabeth II and the recent census result, showing a Catholic majority in the North, are sure to increase unease.But loyalism has never been just one thing, and in Northern Protestants Susan McKay finds people from staunch unionist backgrounds voting Alliance and ...”

“... and unmoving as a stone deity. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of Suddenly Last Summer. Mam was not ill like this. She had nothing to do with the distracted creature who sat by the nearest bed, her gown hitched high above her knees, banging her spoon on a tray. But as I turned to go I saw ...”