“... no 17th-century vernacular poet of this name is now recorded.’ But this is of course John Ogilby, the dancing-master turned voluminous poet, whom Pope repeatedly gives us licence to call ‘great’ (‘Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great’ and ‘thy great fore-father, Ogilby’ in the Dunciad; Ogilby also ornaments MacFlecknoe). This ...”

“... pioneer works as S.E. Rasmussen’s astonishingly innovative London: The Unique City (1934) and John Summerson’s now-classic Georgian London (1945). So influential have these books become that, in retrospect, their novelty and audacity are hard to appreciate. But at the time of publication, they were milestones in the history of architecture, showing how ...”

“... guides to all they see, but may well also feel the want of more information about the major styles involved than Professor Pevsner’s peremptory abbreviations: E.E., Dec., Perp. etc. The Babel of architectural traditions in most medieval cathedrals makes rigid consistency well-nigh impossible, and alternative allocations would be open to the same ...”

“... have guessed that of those two struggling young literary journalists, Thomas would become a major poet, and he himself the author of children’s tales loved by millions – nor that his liking for the verse of W.H. Davies, from which he quoted at length in Bohemia, was the portent of a shift in taste which would dominate middlebrow readers for ...”

“... character privileged to observe and reflect upon his surroundings. Apparently, this gives him a major advantage in the contest for the reader’s sympathies, to which must be added the considerable charm Storey grants to his personality: strong, silent, laconic, deadpan. Compared with others in the book, Attercliffe says little and does less. Most of the ...”

“... will never match up to the number of votes cast in their favour. So long therefore as both major parties resolutely reject any form of proportional representation, only by some kind of power-sharing can the Liberals hope to bribe one or other of those parties into accepting PR as the price of guaranteed support for some of their own policies. But once ...”

“... later restitution and final division. One might expect that all these variations would lead to major differences of demography. After all, Ladurie suggests, the custom of primogeniture (he remarks en passant how snobbish and affected of the English peasants it was to follow this) helped to make England a land of emigration. One would suppose that by ...”

“... has narrowed its meaning since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined ...”

“... who grew up hearing lectures about her father’s genius – given, of course, by Isou himself.The major psychotic breakdown came in May 1968. Isou couldn’t stop talking, sometimes in languages nobody could understand. The tumultuous events then happening in Paris merged in his mind with the war and the pogrom in Bucharest. The événements confirmed his ...”

“... Someone talked her out of that. Instead, she and Kwarteng spent the next ten days planning for a major shift in government policy at a time when most government activity was on hold. During the period of mourning Britain looked like a country that knew what it was about, confident in its institutions and proud of its traditions. But that’s because it was ...”

“... and Eurocentric perspective’ date from the first half of the last century. Set against, say, John Elliott’s concept of a ‘multiple monarchy’ (Elliott is absent even from Kamen’s bibliography which, given his enormous influence, is difficult to account for) or Serge Gruzinski’s writings on mestisaje (also absent) which depict the Empire as not ...”

“... longest-running experiment in the history of science. The Park Grass Experiment, set up in 1856 by John Bennet Lawes at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire, has now been running more than five times longer than its nearest rival, and still yields results of use to plant ecologists. The original object was to assess the effects of different fertilisation regimes on a ...”

“... Statues meurent aussi (1953) and the ground-breaking Nuit et brouillard (1955); he then became a major figure in the French short film industry of the 1950s and 1960s, pioneering a new genre, ‘the essay-film’, in a series of documentaries from around the world. In all, he has made more than forty films and published seven books of photographs; in the ...”

“... Burnley and Wolves. In 1861, at under 20,000, Middlesbrough’s population could not support a major club, but by 1881 it had 55,934 inhabitants and by 1901, 91,302. Middlesbrough FC followed this curve. It was founded in 1876, went professional in 1889 and was in Division I by 1902. The football revolution had enormous social significance. Above all, it ...”

“... countries of Britain, Ireland and Germany, while Italy, Poland and the Soviet Union – the major nurseries of the third wave’s new immigrants – together received about 10 per cent. Further evidence of the climate of racist thinking that informed the 1924 statute were the provisos debarring all Asians from entry, and declaring those already in the ...”