“... drinking itself to death. The ‘Roberts’ (Colquhoun and MacBryde) were there beside him; Dylan Thomas was boozing in the same pubs. Art is not made in that spirit any more. The notion that all things are a gamble, that candles should be burnt at both ends, that poverty is often art’s handmaid and scrounging talent’s ...”

“... of marriage, than a holy institution of God’. William Gouge, a London minister, was a little more relaxed: in 1622 he allowed ‘all those lawful customs that are used for the setting forth of the outward solemnity thereof, as meeting of friends, accompanying the bridegroom and bride both to and from the church, putting on best apparel, feasting, with ...”

“... on’ they will not be held accountable for their actions. Chickens do not come home to roost any more. Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire campaigners against NIREX’s attempts to test, as suitable for nuclear waste disposal, the clay of Killingholme and Fulbeck have invoked the precedent of Crichel Down, an area taken over by government during World War ...”

“... against Euro-madness, when ‘Brussels’ issued specifications (at least 5½ inches long, no more than 1.1 inches thick). In the Caribbean, where bananas are the staple crop of several islands, the fruit isn’t so funny and banana jokes are wry. In the Fifties, in the Dutch, French and British islands, the end of the imperial era was marked by a ...”

“... came in the cinema. He was enchanted by Leslie Howard in Korda’s Scarlet Pimpernel and even more by Vivien Leigh in The Hamilton Woman, which begins with the elderly, raddled Emma looking into the camera as the picture dissolves and we see her young again ‘in all her beauty, running through the splendours of the palace in Naples’. It was ...”

“... Order around 1223 and spent most of his long academic career between Paris and Cologne, where Thomas Aquinas was his star student. Even then, the university was no ivory tower. Faculty had to deal with heresy charges, censorship by overreaching bishops, rivalry between friars and secular masters, and drunken brawls among students – who could matriculate ...”

“... As Roper demonstrates in her absorbing account of the Peasants’ War, this outburst was more than a historical curiosity. The rebellion was an expression of a novel political sensibility and has informed every major European insurrection since; it can’t be understood without considering the rebels’ inner lives as well as their material ...”

“... for their children, but were discriminating about what they were offered: preferring to pay at more old-fashioned local establishments when the new free schemes seemed too regimented or ideological. This, it seems to me, was good history. It came up with a novel but plausible insight about our ancestors. Laqueur’s argument may not stand the test of ...”

“... the only reasons why the bandwagon of constitutional reform has been gathering pace. There is a more widespread feeling than for many decades that civil liberties are under threat, that our existing institutions are inadequate for protecting them and that our public political ceremonial bears less and less resemblance to the realities of the exercise of ...”

“... Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his splendid stories John Updike creates a far more telling image of himself as a denizen of suburban America, and a participator in its ritual matings and partings, than if he had spelt it all out in the true first person, recounting his triumphs and disasters in the field of sex and family life. The moral ...”

“... would have suffered irreparably if everything elevated in it had not been mingled with its baser, more primitive elements. Bruno Schulz was not Dante. Nor was he another Kafka (a writer whom he greatly admired). No Thomas Aquinas stood behind Schulz’s infernos and glimpses of paradise; nor is there in his work any notion ...”

“... spirit in both these American poets, the collective spirit that Pound did so much to foster. More and more, he appears as the presiding genius not only of ‘Modernism’ but of modern American literary culture. In the aquarium with Jarrell, to be more precise at the ...”

“... turned ardent Thatcherite has produced, among other books, The Birth of the Modern (weighing in at more than a thousand pages), Modern Times, a massive chronicle of the 20th century, and lengthy histories of Christianity and Judaism. If succinctness is not his forte, neither is modesty. Johnson’s latest book opens with the claim that it ‘has new and often ...”

“... This attempt to embrace all living nature within a single system was an enormous task, more enormous by far than he conceived. Erroneously believing the tropics to be biologically rather uniform, Linnaeus thought that there were about six thousand animal species; the true number is more like ten million. He was ...”

“... to rediscover it. Liberty in the 17th century was thought to be enshrined in unwritten laws more ancient than the monarchy, and thus capable of being turned against regal arrogance. Charles I could do pretty much as he liked as long as he covered his back by invoking the national interest, a ruse that might strike Britons today as vaguely familiar. But ...”