“... their calls for reform when they needed to sweeten their Presbyterian allies in Scotland, but drew back when moderate English opinion had to be conciliated. The ‘piety’ of ‘Warwick’s godly mafia’, an organisation which in one of Adamson’s eirenic moments is allowed to have been ‘first and foremost the outward expression’ of an ‘inward ...”

“... chronicles, both contemporary and written long afterwards. It is unclear how much the chroniclers drew on anything more than rumour and hearsay. Each had his own agenda. With the Capetians, there are few examples of triumphalist court-sponsored narratives such as those promoted by the early Carolingian rulers. Instead, the chroniclers offered idiosyncratic ...”

“... And the plays brought in a lot of money. ‘I had achieved what I wanted . . . Bernard Partridge drew a cartoon for Punch in which William Shakespeare was shown biting his fingers in front of the boards that advertised my plays.’ As a wit-about-town, Maugham had various dalliances with women. His lust for chaps was a fairly open secret in his circle – he ...”

“... they’re busy too.’ In those days, doctors-in-training and students, rather than phlebotomists, drew blood at night, with varying success (this at one of the best resourced hospitals in the world, and one of the oldest in the US). The resident stuck a needle in the crook of my arm and popped a glass tube into the plastic sleeve on the bevelled surface of ...”

“... culture’s pleasures were hard to admit. Clement Greenberg argued in a 1939 PR essay that kitsch drew on ‘simulacra of genuine culture’. Apart from drinking a lot, the PR writers were American Jewish puritans.After a decade, Rahv and Phillips put together an anthology called The Partisan Reader. The magazine had started with eight hundred subscribers in ...”

“... to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah (Cajah), Leonora Elizabeth (Betsey), Emma and baby John. Here, in the summer of 1820, William Hazlitt entered their lives, and here Sarah steps into the limelight of the Liber Amoris. That book remains the primary source for what happened between them – how could it be ...”

“... Scotland; Sheridan Le Fanu’s protestant Gothic; William Carleton’s stories from Tyrone, which drew on oral tradition. By the time Yeats edited Representative Irish Tales in 1891, responding to the fin-de-siècle fashion for stories, he had a large corpus to draw on. But it was reasonable for him to object that much of it was culturally deficient. Before ...”

“... all the claptrap that was explicit by the time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The play and movie were both big successes; Williams lived on them for decades. But the struggle over the third act had been painful, and his friendship with Kazan was never quite the same. He said once that the rewriting ...”

“... wish to part. In ‘The Fête’ – a poem Ezra Pound chose for the Egoist, and on which Knox drew for his parody (it begins: ‘To-night again the moon’s white mat/Stretches across the dormitory floor’) – a sixteen-year-old French boy recalls escaping from boarding school to go to the circus. ‘The black clown, with his dirty grin/ Lay, sprawling ...”

“... tend to take emphatic pride in their nation’s carriers: the Royal Navy refers to HMS Queen Elizabeth, launched in 2014, as ‘4.5 acres of floating sovereign power’. The US has eleven full-size fleet carriers, more than the rest of the world combined. It wasn’t always so. Japan had ten carriers by 1940 and Japanese admirals pioneered the carrier ...”

“... to do with Simón. In effect, they become a couple who don’t have sex and aren’t sure what drew them together in the first place, semi-strangers linked only by a concern for their child’s welfare. So, apart from being, in some way, Joseph, Mary and Jesus, they might not be such an unusual type of family.Most of the time David, who was judged to be ...”

“... George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been unlikely to come across, she says, let ...”

“... lavish and well reproduced (with the sole exception of the portrait of the Moorish ambassador to Elizabeth I following preliminary page 64, a painting which hangs in the Shakespeare Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as ...”

“... which Boyd was a stronger suspect than the man originally charged with Nikki’s murder. As Wright drew the jury’s attention to them, it began to feel as if he were also prosecuting the original police inquiry.Heron,​ then 23, who lived on the same floor of Wear Garth as Nikki’s grandparents and Boyd, was arrested on 15 October 1992. Police computers had ...”

“... The Suez Canal, according to a recent history of the WHO by Marcos Cueto, Theodore Brown and Elizabeth Fee, made Europeans feel ‘dangerously close to India’.† In 1900 the fear was the imminent completion of a railway line linking Berlin to Mecca, seen as a cholera hotbed.Cholera, which returned to Europe repeatedly during the 19th century, was the ...”