“... in company.Whereupon Arnold makes Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ keep company with Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’.There are many moments in For Every Sin when the prose loses its equipoise, and settles as mannerism. Well-managed, and well-mannered, never inept but often unapt. Such lapses, in a novel where the protagonist finally succumbs to the strain of it ...”

“... demonstrating the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine the implications of the change in policy from war to peace after 1629. He ignores the two peace treaties of 1630, and the Goa treaty of 1635, which marked a new turn in foreign and trading ...”

“... The 1930s, the chronicler of American poverty Michael Harrington once said, ended in 1948, when the Cold War began to call into question the idea that democracy would lead to socialism. But by that definition, perhaps the 1930s didn’t really end until 11 September 1973, when Pinochet launched his coup against Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, and Allende committed suicide in the national palace ...”

“... judge who had bent the law on Richard’s orders; Alexander Neville, the archbishop of York; Michael de la Pole, the chancellor; and de Vere, whom Richard had recently named marquess of Dublin and duke of Ireland. All five, along with a widening circle of associates, were convicted of treason by Parliament. Brembre, the only one who dared to appear in ...”

“... and became a regular editor on the paper. Then, with Ionescu’s help, he got a Government grant to pursue his law studies in Paris. By the time he returned, in 1931, Romanian politics had become more contentious. Previously, it had mostly been about gaining access to the public trough, but now a postwar generation, puerile, violent, romantic, shifted ...”

“... routine matter ever since the Act of Union for Parliament to renew each year the modest government grant to the Catholic seminary of St Patrick’s, Maynooth, a few miles from Dublin. Why should Gladstone so violently object to the 1838 renewal? Why did he change his mind and vote for renewal in 1842? Why, above all, having caved in, did he then resign on the ...”

“... critic should notice that these are distinctive, that most of Milton is not like this at all. Michael Watkins in an unpublished thesis observes that Fish makes Milton sound exactly like George Herbert, and of course he is nothing like George Herbert. Herbert’s central theology is thoroughly Calvinist; he accepts the depravity of man. Milton famously ...”

“... O Lord, perceive and hear My heart, my hope, my plaint, my overthrow, My will to rise, and let by grant appear That to my voice thine ears do well intend. (130) For concision and straightforward speech, Arthur Golding – whose translation of Ovid was loved by Pound and plagiarised by Shakespeare – in 1571: My heart is boiling of a good word. The work ...”

“... depended on outside power. For a time, such power was forthcoming. In the early 1870s, President Grant sent troops to South Carolina and federal marshals to Alabama to protect former slaves. The willingness to intervene with force soon waned, however, and the violent overthrow of Reconstruction followed, a process whites called Redemption, or the restoration ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”

“... She hadn’t been sure whether she should let Geoffrey Keynes buy a portrait of her by Duncan Grant: ‘We don’t copulate without marriage,’ he wrote, ‘but we do meet in cafés, talk on buses, go on unchaperoned walks, stay with each other, give each other books, without marriage. Can’t we even have each other’s pictures?’ But the practice of ...”

“... for robust domestic consumer spending: it didn’t ensure that there were banks ready to grant home or car loans, or rural credit organisations capable of helping farmers modernise. Consumers stuck their money in the bank, or under the mattress, giving China one of the highest rates of household savings in the world. This strategy was part of an ...”

“... manager of Watford, a team he had just guided into the Premier League. Boothroyd had been reading Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball – which revolutionised baseball by showing how spreadsheets and statistical analysis could produce a winning formula – and he told me he had a team of number crunchers slaving away to work the same magic on football. He ...”

“... conditions of its production.’ In support of this claim, Norris paraphrases an argument of Michael Ryan from his Marxism and Deconstruction, makes numerous, if cryptic allusions to the writings of Derrida, and relies on his interpretation of the ‘hard’ deconstruction of Paul de Man. This reliance makes for very heavy going. His discussion of de Man ...”

“... of his ‘Who ...’?) But the difficulty with the radical’s ‘Who whom?’ is that it invites Michael Frayn’s reasonable regression: Who asks ‘Who whom?’?The blurb to the wonderful vast new Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk-Greenbaum-Leech-Svartvik) says truly of its quadrumvirate that they are ‘acknowledged to be leading ...”