“... his research. Mrs Spong thought O’Connor’s memories ‘mostly fantasy’ and was prepared to grant only that he might have visited Surrey ‘at some time in his life’. The bohemian spirit operates along different lines from those that propel the mainstream of society, and according to other impulses. Therefore, while bohemians are often ...”

“... of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle ...”

“... In The Man Who Invented Fidel, Anthony DePalma notes that Castro, in the 1960s, had offered to grant him Cuban citizenship: ‘What a splendid Cuban Herbert Matthews would make,’ a Cuban publication proclaimed, ‘so upright and so just!’ On his last trip to Cuba, in 1972, Matthews, gaunt and frail (he was 57 when he visited Castro in the Sierra ...”

“... In perhaps the most widely read book on the subject, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Thomas Frank argued that the upheavals of the 1960s generated fears and resentments that allowed issues such as abortion rights and racial equity to eclipse economics. Cowie’s book is both an ambitious history lesson and a contribution to this ongoing ...”

“... makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature ...”

“... England,’ he said, ‘justice is open to all, like the Ritz.’ The Early Victorian poet Thomas Love Peacock had noted the unequal impact of the Sunday observance laws: The poor man’s sins are glaring; In the face of ghostly warning He is caught in the fact Of an overt act – Buying greens on a Sunday morning. The rich man is invisible In the ...”

“... however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as Thomas Erskine, a more important figure, because he is the exemplar for a thesis which rings through the book like the 13th chime of the clock – that where the old form of English trial was a truth-seeking process, albeit an inefficient one, the modern ...”

“... things to come’ is revised to ‘dreaming’. Ackroyd’s second book of poetry, with its Duncan Grant cover, signalled a homecoming. Title? London Lickpenny. Already, in 1973, the poet was rehearsing pinball-arcade extracts that would resurface, nine years later, in his first novel, The Great Fire of London. The brief flirtation with the obscurantism of the ...”

“... and arresting the servants; ‘chief extremity’ was used on his younger brother and confidant, Thomas Kelley. The house was put under guard, and Kelley’s laboratory sealed up. All the ‘elixirs’ in it were impounded; also certain ‘boards’, perhaps wall-panels, painted with arcane hieroglyphs. Learning of Kelley’s escape, the Emperor ‘cursed in ...”

“... it’s situated in the heart of the conservation area, we were able to do by means of a government grant. Stage 2 was to empty the apartments. Happily many of the tenants were elderly so we could leave this largely to a process of natural wastage. When the overall population of the building had come down to a manageable number, Stage 3 involved locating this ...”

“... her first in any language.The most eloquent invocation of the seedy set-up was made by the poet Thomas Hood, who used Crachami’s exhibition to illustrate the price of fame, or of visibility, even in a person who was hardly visible to begin with. (Hood may have had in mind a sketch by John Augustus Atkinson which shows a man standing in the doorway of a ...”

“... numbers, Origen, the Great War, puns, madrigals, nail-making, Nye Bevan, biplanes, God, Thomas Bradwardine, Platonism, Messiaen, hawthorns, forgotten martyrs, Iceland, the Virgin, Welsh history, laurels, prophecy, cabalism). The instant sources of delight are lines that reverberate in the mind (‘A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost ...”

“... that would make Joseph Goebbels proud’. Eurozone finance ministers found Varoufakis hard work. Thomas Wieser, the former head of the Eurogroup Working Group, an advisory body to Eurozone finance ministers, recently told a Swiss newspaper that during meetings Varoufakis kept up long monologues, delaying real negotiations in the hope that a last-minute panic ...”

“... they expected to fight them in Texas as well. They probably didn’t realise, however, that their grant from the Mexican government had placed them deep in Comanchería, the area of the South-West controlled by the Comanches, or that the Mexicans intended to use the rapidly growing colonies of English-speaking settlers from the US (known as Anglos) to create ...”

“... by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy ...”