“... I took Donne’s greatness as axiomatic. I still enjoy much of Donne much of the time, but will grant more readily that Dryden and Johnson had a point: conspicuous cleverness is not always a good thing. It can go too far, and seem merely frivolous. There are moments, subjects and genres where it feels out of place. The usual advice – read a poet’s best ...”

“... of Athens invites adaptation because it is already a collaboration – it was partly written by Thomas Middleton, who composed its city comedy-like scenes – and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play ...”

“... Duke of Parma. A more immediate success was that otherwise inexplicable papal readiness to grant the untried Society its generous Bull of Foundation in 1540. There was back-up. Leonor de Mascarenhas, a strong-minded, cultured and celibate Portuguese noblewoman, was the much loved governess to Charles V’s two legitimate daughters and the future ...”

“... reviewing your own Life; why should I at your Age like it better?’ Meeting her in Bath, the poet Thomas Moore saw the ‘faces of other times’ – Johnson’s the first among them – ‘crowd over her as she sat’, while the actor William Charles Macready, remembering her fifty years later, said his first glimpse of her ‘seemed almost as if a portrait ...”

“... New Critics, and of the Agrarians also, inevitably loomed large too, and in an application for a grant to continue work on Wise Blood on completion of the course, O’Connor compared Hazel Motes’s search for a spiritual home to Eliot’s in The Waste Land. From Iowa she moved to the artists’ colony at Yaddo, where she got caught up in Robert Lowell’s ...”

“... articulate and confident’ (that’s Rummy); ‘a wise, principled, humane man’ (Clarence Thomas); and so on. Then the person does whatever Bush tells him to do. Bush is the lone hero of every page of Decision Points. Very few spoken words are assigned to him, outside of the public records of speeches and press conferences, and in nearly all of them ...”

“... four million people who gave him $200 or less – ‘changed the way campaigns are funded’. At Grant Park in Chicago the night he was first elected president, he said that his campaign had been ‘built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause’. But in 2008, small donors supplied just 30 ...”

“... later than Wilson, a black sailor from Boston, was being admired there as a sort of Greek god. Sir Thomas Lawrence found in him the combined perfections of the finest Classical statues, and Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote as enthusiastically about him as he did about the Parthenon Marbles. Having taken separate moulds of all parts of Wilson’s body, Haydon ...”

“... blends the hypochondria of Sanditon’s Diana Parker with the injudicious high living of Dr Grant in Mansfield Park. ‘Bertha’s health,’ says her husband Randolph regretfully, ‘wouldn’t have stood any district but W1 or SW1. Anything near the Harrow Road, or the canal, or Kensal Green cemetery had to be avoided at all costs. My particular ...”

“... Until the 17th century this country remained, in this respect, on the fringe of Europe. Then Thomas Gataker, who turned down the Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in ...”

“... Then there’s Doctor Reichhardt, the artist imprisoned for his ideals, but he is more of a Thomas Mann-style grand bourgeois. Perhaps the multiple self-portraits make sense: there’s always more than one Hans Fallada. In Fallada’s 1942 memoir, Damals bei uns daheim (Our Home in Days Gone By), he describes himself as a Pechvogel, an unlucky ...”

“... dollar. ‘Nobody knew what these debts were, what their amount, or what their proofs,’ cried Thomas Jefferson. ‘No matter,’ he continued, ‘we will guess them to be twenty million . . . The more debt Hamilton could rake up, the more plunder for his mercenaries.’ Jefferson thought he knew the source of Hamilton’s madness: he was ‘so bewitched ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... the male urge towards self-mutilation on the altar of the matriarchal ideal. The Muse will gladly grant the poet her love, ‘but at only one price: his life’. In ‘Darien’ the eager bard begs his mistress to behead him with ‘the curved blade of her Cretan axe’. At the very least he must have experienced ‘a vision of the Naked King crucified to the ...”

“... sphere and women were relegated to home and the private sphere. Hollander makes powerful use of Thomas Laqueur’s recent book, Making Sex, to support her arguments here. She draws on his proposition that an original one-sex model, in which women were seen as fundamentally the same as men was replaced by the end of the 18th century by a two-sex model, which ...”