“... the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any of the lads from school put a hand up my skirt in the handball alley, but the anxiety persisted. Gabriel might show up at any moment and announce that the Holy ...”

“... its neglect of quantitative constraints and semantics. The suggestion that syntax and semantics may have evolved independently at first then combined leads to the study of the first shared lexicon, the commonalty of unitary learned symbols that resulted from the convergence of individual expressive choices into a socially accepted pattern, and that preceded ...”

“... brats. ‘She had 2 Bastards, others say Three,’ Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear ...”

“... claim: ‘This change began, to speak approximately, as we must, in the 17th century and may be described as the transition in the art of the West from a poetics of hallucination typical of Spenser to a poetics of delirium, inaugurated by Milton’. The West? That is a large claim. The change Teskey claims Milton represents is not a clean ...”

“... like critical legal studies and critical legal sociology. These movements scrutinise what may be called the cultural self-constitution of law. They attempt to trace exactly how the law goes about establishing its own splendid eminence. In so doing, they adopt an external perspective on the law, keenly aware of the outward mechanics of its ...”

“... neighbours and associates was so common as to be considered normal. In the light of this book, we may have to consider whether this is not also a part of the British way of life. According to the authors, Henry Kerby, a Tory MP, reported to MI5 on his fellow Parliamentarians. George Wigg, a Labour MP, told MI5 all he could find out about what was going on in ...”

“... of painting never assert their individuality in this way. The life of a piece of sculpture may of course be endangered by the material it is made of: bronzes were melted down to make canons; Inca gold sculpture was pretty often turned into ingots. The process of making can sometimes be understood by just looking at a surface. Penny shows a detail from ...”

“... are always more or less absurd. Hopkins said, ‘Christ is your only literary critic,’ and it may be added that He does not run a book club. But Lewis certainly achieved the distinction of being represented, on an upper floor of Wheaton College, Illinois – Billy Graham’s old college – in the collection of memorabilia of such Christian writers as ...”

“... really fail quite as badly as this book implies? Should not future editions include entries on May McKisack (an expert Medievalist), on Dorothy George (who pioneered the scholarly study of cartoons), on Phyllis Deane, the economic historian, and indeed on Natalie Zemon Davis? And, while I am labouring this particular point, should women’s history really ...”

“... Gary Bennett were not strangers or even remote acquaintances but friends and that whatever else may be said in its favour the Preface was a sharp personal attack, bred out of disappointment.’ Maybe there are moments when humanists can see things rather more clearly than theologians. Certainly, that passage contrives to put Bennett’s conduct in the ...”

“... old as Marcuse’s 1937 essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ and as contemporary as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s 1998 Culture and the State – that such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status ...”

“... its composer’s world view. The two hands, however, are so different from each other that one may doubt whether theirs is the same trunk: great music expresses religious facts – or, if you like, metaphysical truths – which words really can’t; whereas words express political facts which music, let’s face it, can’t. Eisler, his biographer, and ...”

“... without a dozen hitmen (book, TV, theatre) pumping lead into his vital parts. Charles Charming may have been the most exposed poem in history, but it may also turn out to have been the most comprehensively reviled (the Sunday Times went so far as to dub it ‘The Worst Poem of the Twentieth Century’). Thus, even in ...”

“... in a ‘History of Civilisation’ series, in which it joins such works as Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it then bore the title The ...”