“... truth which lies in tranquillity: society is ruin.’ But he offers one further clue, a hint so broad that it defies one to take it seriously: that de Maistre is a priest of Naphta. If we take him at his word, everything falls into place, and the story of Kasch becomes a straightforward parable about the transition from the Ancien Régime to ...”

“... which for four years was methodically (and, from the South Coast, audibly) reduced to mush. Sir William Orpen, visiting the Somme battlefield six months after the slaughter, reported vividly and unexpectedly: no words could express the beauty of it. The dreary, dismal mud was baked white and pure – dazzling white. While daisies, red poppies and a blue ...”

“... on his own work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to ...”

“... of protest’ swinging between left and right (thinking, presumably, that protest today must mean William Hague). But contemporary protesters have given up on the pendulum. Protest today is against neo-liberalism, global financial interests, international corporations and all politicians – right, left or centre – who support them. In Crystal ...”

“... family (excepting the joyous interlude of Edward VII). All that would now change, no doubt, if William Rodgers and Prince Charles simultaneously arrived at supreme power: the one wrote for, the other confessedly followed, The Good Food Guide. Even gossip fragments like these are clues to the altered sensibility that has put cooks in front of the cameras ...”

“... whiggism. The narrative, composed by a senior scholar who could offer the long view, presented a broad highway (call it ‘truth’) from which a number of tracks emerged, some longer and more heavily travelled than others but all petering out sooner or later (call them ‘errors’). The strategy for the historian – for example, Lowie in ...”

“... so as to get my bearings again. I say ‘unfairly’ because neither author aims to do anything as broad as Lopez, whose book combined an awareness of the region’s history with a naturalist’s knowledge of its ecology. Kavenna pursues the myth of Thule, and Davidson the imaginative allure the North has for artists and writers. Neither mentions Lopez ...”

“... sonnet “To Sleep”, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen and Hugo’s Hernani must be so broad as to be meaningless.’ The desire for unattainable precision and curious universal truths is also a Romantic trait, and it may be that some of the more ambitious forms of modern literary criticism will come to be seen as a late flowering of the Romantic ...”

“... in a riot of onomatopoeia when the song was performed as a round. Harris introduces us to William Merle, who between 1337 and 1344 kept a diary of the weather at Driby in Lincolnshire, one of the earliest such records to survive, and to Sir Gawain watching the seasons turn in the anxious year between his first meeting with the Green Knight and the ...”

“... The three figures about whom Stubbs has most to say, the poets Sir John Suckling, Thomas Carew and William Davenant, do to varying degrees answer to that description. Though his book makes no claims to archival discovery, it lights up their writing and brings fresh perception to the ties of friendship between them, to their travels and adventures and ...”

“... against the main Protestant rival for maritime and commercial empire, the Dutch; and by the 1680s, William Petty was writing about the ‘Dominion of the Sea’ and the utility of a blatantly navalist strategy: ‘such as desire empire & liberty … let them encourage the art of ship-building.’ This notion that maritime empire was fully compatible with ...”

“... daunting.’ Very likely so, but why ‘must’? More important, he sometimes credits Welch with broad generalisations, which are exactly what, by implication, his prose eschews. On a passage in A Voice through a Cloud, describing the brusque way in which a nurse rips off the narrator’s dressings, Methuen-Campbell comments: ‘When morning came there was ...”

“... and juries were reluctant to convict. Pepys describes young women in London being abducted in broad daylight by gentlemen who had no reason to fear the authorities. Women told stories of forced sex not to bring prosecutions for rape, but in order to explain away illegitimate births (which were punished by a flogging). In the absence of a pregnancy there ...”

“... notions of proper and upstanding conduct. The college represented a generalised education, broad and sweeping, aimed at the production of worthy citizens dedicated to America’s welfare and traditional belief in progress and democracy. To these aims, shared by American educational leaders elsewhere, Hutchins added concerns of his own. For one thing ...”

“... line. Two decades of ideological battles within English-teaching had led to the emergence of a broad compromise over the issues of the teaching of Standard English and the literary canon, but this liberal compromise, faithfully echoed in the Cox Report, was not acceptable to right-wing ideologues or to the Tory tabloids. Cox described his proposals as ...”