“... the random Ethiope innately repulsive, unworthy of the bright jewel in his or her ear.This may not be the way the image has always worked in practice, however, given that Romeo and Juliet is a play in which dark night is the time of love, garish day the time of destructive violence. Juliet will soon be begging the fiery-footed steeds of the sun to ...”

“... and ‘coherence’ – are, in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, incommensurable. One marker may prize originality or inventiveness; another may be a stickler for accuracy. It’s largely a matter of temperament. More authoritarian personalities may be inclined to emphasise the ...”

“... while treating intellect as a barrier to faith. Ruth worries that, given her shortcomings, she may never marry. A brother can ask permission to begin correspondence with a baptised sister, but all ‘licit courtship’ is mediated by the elders. Since there are fewer men than women in the Brotherhood, the elders decide who will remain ...”

“... world is clasped in their tenacious tendrils and covered with your verdant love. In the end you may even shed all sense of separate selfhood as you learn, with Spinoza or Hegel, that there is no true identity short of an all-encompassing God. Charity, it appears, begins in your own mind. We all started out, as Freud put it, with a cheerful ...”

“... expulsion orders, 25 registration orders and ten prohibition orders were made, and by the end of May 1940, a total of 167 expulsion orders had been made, statistics which ignore the substantial emigration of the Irish from Britain following the Act. Originally due to expire on 28 July 1941, it was kept in force until the end of that year under wartime powers ...”

“... lines, property. His pillow-talk with Anne Hathaway, Emilia Lanier or Mr W. H., interesting as it may have been, was not recorded. If you want to discuss Shakespeare, you have to depend on reading and seeing his work. Not so with Brecht. Not only did he write a great deal of commentary himself. All those who knew him well were impressed, and by now almost ...”

“... possess one’s soul in silence.’ She wrote this in the diary she began when she was 40, so it may be that her memory was coloured by the experiences of adult life. But when she was 17, William, on an expedition in Brazil, sent his love to Henry and Alice and asked: ‘Does the latter continue to wish she was dead?’ It ...”

“... a bottom-up view of human society depicted through a representative socially low figure. Then you may think: aw, come off it. Read what it says on the label and stop being so darned clever: you can’t take the pastor out of pastoral without collapsing it into all things.Empson’s belief in the plurality of diverse elements within texts and within societies ...”

“... does not argue for a return to the old English system; he accepts that ‘two-sided partisanship may indeed have been better than one-sided partisanship’; but he advocates a resumption of the search for the truth – whatever that signifies – by means of a modern inquisitorial system. The suggestion that modern inquisitorial procedures are superior to ...”

“... of social benefit with the minimum of economic disturbance.’ The carefully balanced antitheses may come over a little too rhetorically now, but they encapsulate exactly what many in the Labour Party would have agreed that they had in mind. The third principle was the protection of the legitimate interests of organised labour in the face of the traditional ...”

“... place name: Salem was a city set on a hill for a newly founded Puritan Israel. Armchair travellers may prefer to turn to YouTube to revisit the recent royal wedding, and the communal singing of a peculiar poem by William Blake that has gained national anthem status. It was not much thought of until it acquired a splendid musical setting, an inspired piece of ...”

“... Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of support). At first glance, this may seem to be the literary and intellectual establishment in its pomp. Reference works and biographies make it plain that these figures could collectively boast a remarkable level of official recognition (or at least would come to do so before their ...”

“... why should carpenters be so disparaged when loggers and sawyers go uncriticised? The answer may be the reluctant admiration for cutters and processors of wood aroused by the vast amount of research Proulx has done into the history of the timber trade, despite her ambition in this book to restore a sense of the sacredness of the forest. The jobs ...”

“... grandfather of Henry VIII’s most unfortunate wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, to whom he may have passed on impeccable nasal hygiene. The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first children’s book: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended ...”

“... those interested in the Sonnets, or students of the lyric, or ‘poets hungry for resource’, may want to browse in. She has included a recording of some of the Sonnets read aloud, because the three other readings available are done by actors (who???) who, typically I would say, speak the lines with constant mis-emphases and ignore the inner antitheses ...”