“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... best that can be said on behalf of Mr Derek Pattinson, the Secretary-General of the Synod, and Mr James Shelley, the Secretary to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ‘fute-ball and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while Henry VIII made football a penal offence. Under Elizabeth I, the Grand Jury of Middlesex held that it was ‘an unlawful game, a great affray likely to result in homicides ...”

“... 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 ...”