“... committed spiritual healer, Osofo, a pastor of the Church of the Smiling Saint. While his gentle bishop calms and cajoles the sick, Osofo overwhelms them with his zeal and intensity. ‘God has put some fire into his hands.’ In religious exaltation, Osofo leads his Christian flock through Accra, chanting against the Government: ‘One whole country cannot ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... On​ 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... With his first earnings as a garden labourer, the boy walked to Aberdeen and bought six volumes of James Hervey’s Reflections on a Flower Garden – just as Clare had tramped from Helpston to Stamford, before the bookshop opened, to secure a coveted copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. And like Clare, Sinclair paused on ...”

“... Emerson wanted readers to stumble over the Latinism that punctuates this numbed passage. James Marcus tells us that it is a botanical term for the part of a plant that is easily shed as it develops. His zingy, empathetic portrait of Emerson grounds our understanding of his writing – perhaps even his wisdom – in his experience of loss. It often ...”

“... be typical of the middlebrow culture whose laureate was Longfellow and whose critical arbiter was James Russell Lowell, and from which Melville, unlike Henry James or Whitman, could not escape. Melville’s doomed attempt, in the late 1840s, to make himself into a country squire at Arrowhead, his farm in the ...”

“... monopoly. Schama admits that this was shabby behaviour; Sharp was incensed. In a letter to the bishop of London in 1795, which does not appear in Rough Crossings, Sharp held Britain directly accountable for the maintenance of the slave trade in America. In 1772, the Pennsylvania legislature had requested the imposition of prohibitive duties on imported ...”

“... 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 ...”