“... church, and all the culture that went with it, was a leading candidate. In a letter of 1851, Charles Kingsley wrote of Cardinal Newman that ‘in him and in all that school there is an element of foppery – even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement’ – and blamed the ...”

“... millimetre I would go out of my mind. I used to think then that had I had the chance to marry Charles Darwin (or Einstein or Metternich) I might have been able to accept the arrangements that marriage entails a little more gracefully. In the Eighties, long since divorced, I decided that marriage to Nelson Mandela (or Terry Waite) would have suited me ...”

“... Vale Royal, an epic based on the mysteries of Kings Cross, fits seamlessly into the continuum. I hope it is giving this elegantly produced book its due if I call it anonymous: egoic interference is minimal, the poet wills himself to disappear into his text. The fate of this degraded, fought-over, misrepresented landscape, between the nexus of railway ...”

“... less imaginative graduate assistants at the big state universities. It begins with an excerpt from Charles Brockden Brown and his 18th-century religious maniacs and ends with a story about a lovesick football coach in late 20th-century Albuquerque. Though it is not, of course, literally comprised of stories written only by white males, the bulk is still ...”

“... its core is the romance arc of a prince, Pericles (whose motto, In hac spe vivo, means ‘In this hope I live’), losing and then finding his wife and daughter: a wife seemingly buried at sea, but washed ashore at Ephesus to a life as a priestess of Diana; a daughter (‘My gentle babe Marina, whom,/For she was born at sea, I have named so’) apparently ...”

“... that, starting with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, pierced the core of their faith and hope. It cost the Italian Communist Party something like 200,000 members, and most Western Parties the bulk of their intellectuals. And it was literally a spectacle. Hungary 1956 was the first insurrection brought directly into Western homes by ...”

“... fires, water closets, a dumb waiter and easy-wipe parquet floors. She and the housemaid Lottie Hope found it very convenient. Their transfer to the Woolfs’ establishment four years later was therefore something of a let-down from the start. Leonard and Virginia had none of the Frys’ enthusiasm for modern conveniences and without them the artistic ...”

“... has its decisive turning points in politics and diplomacy, starting with the death, childless, of Charles IV, the last Capetian King of France, which opened the way for Edward III, 12 years later, to claim the French throne as a better heir in blood than Philip VI, who succeeded; Philip’s confiscation of Edward’s French duchy of Aquitaine in 1337, which ...”

“... holes in sponsored periodicals. The scene was being set for the arrival in Colchester of Charles Olson, last rector of the now collapsed and dispersed Black Mountain College, theorist and psychopomp of ‘Projective Verse’ and open-field poetics, author of the great post-Poundian epic The Maximus Poems, and headline star of Donald Allen’s ...”

“... His father, the first earl of Rochester, was a royalist general who had fought and spied for Charles I and Charles II and died in exile in 1658. At the Restoration court, where Rochester fils appeared as an impoverished 17-year-old on Christmas Day 1664, neither his mother’s piety nor his father’s courage were of ...”

“... there is the mindless good cheer that can only lead to tears: ‘Prostate Cancer: A Journey of Hope’, Public Television promises. I can hardly wait. And every Tuesday the ‘Science Times’ invites readers to embrace or reject yet another food or beverage so as to prevent this cancer or that form of heart disease. In the beginning, Porter reminds ...”

“... Smith, sometimes he was Stewart, and sometimes he was Preston, but the most telling of the aliases Charles Stewart Parnell used to conduct the liaison with Mrs O’shea that eventually destroyed him was undoubtedly ‘Mr Fox’. Revealed by the divorce proceedings of November 1890, which, in wrecking his alliance with Gladstonian Liberalism, cost him his ...”

“... be that Britain’s way of opening up the country – with gunboats – was counter-productive. Charles Elliot, a far gentler envoy than Pottinger, which is why Palmerston eventually sacked him, thought it would have been (in Lovell’s paraphrase) ‘better for the long term to bank goodwill than hard cash’. In the very long term this has turned out to ...”

“... polls that a majority of Australians will not choose to see their sovereignty reside in Prince Charles’? Only if the whingeing latte-sippers and culture-heads get their act together for another push against the system. Penal colonisation has given way to ‘independent’ self-colonisation. Keneally points out that the 1999 referendum on the monarchy ...”

“... of innocent dead, it will be the response of a nation merely. I fear that we may do that, but hope that we will not. By what we do now, and what we refrain from doing, we ought to wish to be seen to act on behalf of the human nature from which the agents of terror have cut themselves off. In the days after the planes hit, the US appeared to be governed ...”