“... couplets was an achievement unattempted by anyone before and unachieved by anyone since, including Thomas Creech in 1682. Lucy’s first children, twin sons, were born in 1639; she was last pregnant in 1662, so her children may have frequented the schoolroom for rather more than twenty years; her translation of Lucretius could have taken her as long. Though ...”

“... Henry’s reign, surfacing for example in the warning from the mayor of London, the redoubtable Thomas fitzThomas, at St Paul’s in 1265: ‘As long as you wish to be a good king and lord to us, we will be faithful and devoted to you.’After this unpromising start – a civil war in which the barons only narrowly opted in the end for the child Henry ...”

“... of the literature of contemporary social analysis ranging from that composed by Fynes Moryson and Thomas Dineley in the 17th century through that written by Charles O’Conor and Sir Jonah Barrington in the 18th, and forward to that executed by Conrad Arensberg and Rosemary Harris in the present century. Due acknowledgement is made by Dr Foster whenever he ...”

“... lunulae, the exclamation mark and the semicolon. (By the 20th century, one might add, the aged Hugh Kingsmill is moved to reply to an interviewer’s question, Is there anything you would wish to do differently if you had your life over again?, with the rueful self-stricture, ‘Use fewer semi-colons’; and the narrator of Beckett’s Watt is wrung to a ...”

“... little interest in domestic government. In the 1320s, his relationship with his favourite, Hugh Despencer, alienated his wife, Queen Isabella. As a result, with the future Edward III in her company, she refused to return home after a visit to the French court. She was joined abroad by Roger Mortimer, and together they invaded England, gained wide ...”

“... What should we mean by ‘Reformation’? Was it a ‘paradigm shift’ of the kind proposed by Thomas Kuhn, a new set of answers to old questions, a Darwinian moment? Perhaps. For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose Reformation was published in 1996, it was not so much an event in the 16th century, or even an extended process, as a constant manifestation of the spirit of Christianity, at least from 1500 to the present day, ‘a continuing story, embracing the common religious experiences of Christians of different traditions worldwide ...”

“... over the two most substantial essays: Francis Huxley’s ‘Psychoanalysis and Anthropology’, Hugh Lloyd-Jones on ‘The Study of the Ancient World’. Doubtless Huxley will hate being called ‘substantial’: his style is busily flash. But he packs in more information, line by line, than any other contributor, and you finish his lecture with an enlarged ...”

“... writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of one-way crack, or ‘entertaining conversation. Ir craic is the ModE ...”

“... names with less familiar radicals like John Learmont and Joseph Mather, whose ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’ could provide a standby for republicans wanting something to do when the National Anthem is played. I would have liked to see Wordsworth represented by some of the more abrasively radical verse of the 1790s; but we are given several sonnets, and ...”

“... on all the islands in the mid-Atlantic on the way. I had two volumes of the collected works of Thomas Balogh in my luggage, required reading for progressive Latin American economists, as well as a small Stilton cheese in a china jar. This had been purchased at Fortnum and Mason, on the recommendation of my Chilean friend Claudio Véliz, the Latin American ...”

“... in the contrast between the clangorous rhyme of ‘complacent’ with ‘trident’ worthy of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and the much more muffled and uncertain rhyme of ‘impossible’ with ‘thing of all’. In such a case, the poet is carried beyond herself; her own device, rhyme, commits her to saying what she hadn’t it in mind to say. Beer, raised ...”

“... Austen’s more outrageous witticisms come together, as he points out, shortly after the death of Thomas Fowle: Cassandra, he suggests, may have needed a sort of epistolary shock treatment. When Honan enters upon psychological speculation, however, the results are mostly conventional. The shy girl is ill at ease with strangers, finds security in her ...”

“... childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem scarcely less bizarre and exotic. We no longer think of ...”

“... public self grows and flourishes, it buries the private one; though the buried self, like little Hugh of Lincoln, manages to sing on, now and then, from under the dust-heap of publicity. Sean Day-Lewis’s subtitle, ‘An English Literary Life’, refers to only one of these selves, the public one. For that self it is precisely accurate: for it was a ...”

“... sexual radical James Hinton. While involved in this doll’s house in reverse, Ellis attended St Thomas’s Hospital to complete a medical training. He had an unsatisfactory, rather destructive, semi-relationship with Olive Schreiner, with both parties withdrawing as weaknesses were rèvealed. Life was further complicated by the presence of Hinton, whose ...”