“... spread, and many local figures gathered to put questions to the ghost through the little girl; the bishop sent a questionnaire, to which William, prompted by Saint Michael who had appeared in support, gave full replies – about death, the afterlife and the structure of heaven and hell. He uses the word ‘purgatory’ – an early instance of the noun – and ...”

“... it. Many of their Lordships had been roughly handled on the way to Westminster. The Bishop of Lincoln was seized by the throat and (the 76-year-old) Lord Mansfield ‘narrowly escaped with life’, while in the chamber the scene was said to resemble ‘the pit at a Garrick play’. But like the Commons, the Lords did not ‘rush for the ...”

“... of that term. What he calls the ‘a priori’ languages, thought up by such as the 17th-century Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, or by Leibniz, in order to remedy the perceived illogicalities of existing languages, are mimetic in one sense, because the verbal forms they contain are derived from an analysis of the perceived properties of the things or ideas ...”

“... O n​ 12 March 1455, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, soon to be Pope Pius II but then bishop of Siena, wrote to his friend Juan de Carvajal, a Spanish cardinal in Rome, describing a ‘viro mirabili’ (miraculous man) he had seen in the market in Frankfurt. The man was selling Bibles in numbers too large to have been the work of manuscript production: I have not seen complete Bibles, but several quires belonging to different books [of the Bible], exceedingly clean and correct in their script, and without error, which Your Grace could read effortlessly, even without glasses ...”

“... William Frend, George Dyer, John Thelwall, Basil Montagu, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Losh, Joseph Fawcett. Roe’s research has been strenuous, his attention to detail earnest, and his book will be useful. But it will not be quite as useful as the book which he intended to write, which would have brought poetic text and historical context ...”

“... Spain had tired of the exhausting conflict and one of the first acts of Elizabeth’s successor James was to end the 19 years of hostilities with the peace treaty of 1604. Professor Wernham discusses England’s war effort and what it had cost her in human and material resources and in domestic harmony. The Crown’s financial limitations severely ...”

“... canvas, and it is not even certain that his lines portraying it, which were first printed under James I, had been written by 1601 (though it has suited some critics to assert, without evidence, that they were ‘censored’). The Government prosecutors, admittedly, had good reason to emphasise the enactment of Richard’s overthrow, which they took as ...”

“... was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to ...”

“... of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters – particularly the one on ...”

“... Bidart makes the case against it when he turns up a 1959 letter of Lowell’s to Elizabeth Bishop: ‘In the hospital I spent a mad month or more rewriting everything in my three books’ – Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally rose to ...”

“... despised his compatriots for complicity in their plight, and yearned to return to England as a bishop. Complicating things further is Swift’s mode of writing. Impersonation, projection or ventriloquism was his habit, demonstrated throughout Valerie Rumbold’s superb edition of his Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises: spoof prophecies and bogus gallows ...”

“... making love, and perhaps worst of all the ‘obnoxious and joyless’ having sex (Elizabeth Bishop also despised that expression). ‘Your Name Which Isn’t Yours’ considers the effect of having a name capriciously bestowed on you at birth, something with which you can only fully reconcile yourself when you imagine it engraved on a stone. There’s ...”

“... is her only physical link with childhood. Watson struggles to write an endless Latin letter to the Bishop of Winchester to prove his sanity. There is a terrible reality, too, in the abruptness with which the crises occur. Watson’s sacking from Stockwell School seems almost as inexplicable to the reader as it is to him. And when his mind finally ...”

“... Irish, judicious and unmalicious, is a joy to read. The title phrase, which may be traced back to Bishop Berkeley via Yeats, was quoted by Denis Donoghue in his Crane Bag essay (LRB, 21 April-4 May 1983); the essay reappears here (slightly shortened), but with the phrase extracted and expanded into an opening article, in which it and its implications are ...”

“... To Bartolomé de Las Casas, however, another Dominican, later Protector of the Indians and Bishop of Chiapa in Yucatan, the line was too fine. ‘False testimony, a contrived argument for tyranny,’ he scribbled in the margin of one of the judgments. And the judgments, inherently unsteady, did not last. For in 1519-22 Cortes stumbled on what seemed to ...”