“... in the weather tended to be smoothed out. In the short run, contingency mattered, as did bouts of savage weather. But in the long run, climate and geography dominated. Melissa Charenko’s book tracks what happened to climate science when new technologies vastly extended its chronological reach. In the mid-19th century, long-held assumptions about climate ...”

“... was amiss, though differing as to what) in the later 19th century. It crystallised in the savage indictment of the Chinese past and the Chinese character in Liang Qichao’s Theory of a New Citizenry in the first years of the present century. What is Jenner’s diagnosis? First, that the inherited historical vision of ‘China’ is a psychological ...”

“... David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded ...”

“... of syntax and the personification of abstract ideas (another of Wordsworth’s special hates). Robert Mack, properly enough, sets out to be Gray’s advocate and though not all his vindications of individual poems are persuasive, his biography does add an important consideration to our understanding of Gray’s poetic values, and therefore of his high ...”

“... killing white children. What looked like ruthlessness was ‘vision’ – as savage Africa was bound to fall to civilised powers, Rhodes was right to urge that it would benefit not just the settlers but Africans to make as much of it British as possible. Even Schreiner had initially been taken with such grand ambitions: on her return to ...”

“... responded by becoming a complete tomboy and a wilful, troublesome child, which in turn led to savage beatings. Finally, her mother died having the boy she had longed for and Winnie had to nurse this killer man-child. The terrible scars of this childhood doubtless do much to explain Winnie’s impulsive and ‘difficult’ temperament. She decided to ...”

“... in Hollywood, but none of his scripts was ever produced. He worked as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy, a career cut short by JFK’s assassination. Recently, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael ...”

“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”

“... things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s ...”

“... they had learned half of it. No more largesse for the rich or even for the middle-income groups! Savage cuts in almost all public services except defence, together with reductions in the real value of short-term social security benefits, such as sick pay and unemployment benefit, became the order of the day – in defiance of the other half of the lesson ...”

“... the most cosmopolitan writers of the time: one thinks of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Robert Louis Stevenson. Every single great idea that fuelled the driving force of the 19th century – freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also the subcurrents of history uncovered by contemporaries, such as the libido, the unconscious and the uncanny ...”

“... anthropology is precisely this interrelatedness. The sentimental figure of the ecologically noble savage, to which Hemley admits being attracted, has long ceased to interest. The exact degree of the Tasaday’s ‘lostness’ was always a confounding issue. As early as 1971, experienced anthropologists such as Robert Fox ...”

“... It was Roman intervention that had ensured ‘the society of civill life’ and ‘chased away all savage barbarisme from the Britans minds’. The result was the creation of a new identity. ‘And meet it is we should beleeve, that the Britans and Romans in so many ages, by a blessed and joyfull mutuall ingrafting, as it were, have growen into one stocke and ...”

“... attempt to persuade others that Manilius was worth their trouble. ‘I adjure you,’ he wrote to Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, ‘not to waste your time on Manilius. He writes on astronomy and astrology without knowing either.’ To an American correspondent he wrote: ‘I do not send you a copy, as it would shock you very much; it is so dull that few ...”

“... critic John Dennis, John Dyer (the author of the loco-descriptive smash-hit Grongar Hill), Richard Savage, Nahum Tate (the Poet Laureate) and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a while, early in his career, Hill acted as secretary to Lord Peterborough, the future honorary Scriblerian; he was also later distantly linked with Bolingbroke, to whom he addressed ...”