“... censored and distorted, to a degree that significantly changed their direction, by the publisher Murray. Coleridge himself went on editorialising and re-interpreting ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which supplies McGann’s most intricate and fascinating example: ‘The Ancient Mariner’ becomes itself an elaborate commentary upon literary transmission, and a ...”

“... tracks healing the torn paper’. But the poem has a good story to tell – about the visit of Dr Murray to one of his OED contributors, whose home turns out to be Broadmoor – and tells it with chilling assurance, not least in the pacing and line-breaks. Reynolds is learned and laconic and his mind leaps about a bit, a combination which makes some of his ...”

“... a taste for highly creative writing should seek out A.E. Housman: New Poems [sic] ed. [sic] by John Edmunds, with a preface and notes by Hilary Bacon (San Francisco, 1985).Every word, bracket and comma here is so entirely to the point that it is virtually a prose-poem in the genre that Housman made his own: the almost deadpan burlesque of poor ...”

“... as a nationalist alternative. Nothing exemplified the new political culture more tellingly than John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), which the 7:84 theatre company took on tour round Scotland. The play itself was impeccably socialist; but audiences were more alert to its unintended nationalist message. Indeed, there ...”

“... by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price of 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been sold. That same ...”

“... him when necessary. For another, his writing has never been fully at home in the tropics. Les Murray, a comparably prolific user of English under a hot sun, made his poem ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’ into a love song to comfort clothing (‘scunge’), and Walcott likes to wear that kind of thing, but he’s one of the least holidayish of ...”

“... Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow. The rising generation of British officials had a special reverence for the Arabs of the desert, with their ‘wild independence’ and ‘manly frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William ...”

“... the history of witch beliefs and witch trials, however, first took shape in opposition to Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which claimed that Renaissance witches were worshippers of pagan gods. It has therefore been resolutely agnostic about the existence of actual witches in the period of the great witch-hunt. Even Deborah ...”

“... more august colleagues liked him. ‘A delightful and kindly companion of the road’ was the way Murray Kempton, an inveterate connoisseur of rogues, described him. Sparks left his family behind – he missed his father’s funeral – and, for all his surface conviviality, he shunned close ties of any kind, never marrying and working largely by ...”

“... lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is ...”

“... conceptualised witchcraft as a conspiracy against an established monotheistic religion. Pope John XXII (1249-1334) was an enthusiastic enemy of witches and magicians, and his actions against them – issuing injunctions, launching investigations, executing malefactors – caused reverberations as far away as Ireland. There, Petronilla de Meath ended up ...”

“... encyclopedia of the arts and sciences contains an entry along the lines of this one from John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum: ‘MICROPHONES are Instruments contrived to magnifie small Sounds, as Microscopes do small Objects.’Wheatstone, inventor of the concertina, came from a family of musical instrument-makers. The tuning fork featured heavily in ...”

“... thanks to the witty and profane letters he wrote to his good friend the novelist Albert Murray: their collected correspondence appeared in Trading Twelves (2000). We even got a piece of the unfinished second novel in the posthumous Juneteenth (1999). And now, in Rampersad’s long life of Ellison, we get details of all his respectable extra-literary ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”