“... masters, especially Tallis (1989) and Josquin (1993), and an influential recording of Bach’s St John Passion (1991). For the Bach recordings, Parrott employed no more than two singers on each of the chorus parts and used the same singers for the arias. This was a response to traditional choral society performances, which tended to deploy a full ...”

“... republican utopias, you could catch James Harrington at Miles’s; if you wanted literary wit, John Dryden and his mates would be at Will’s; and in the 1710s you could join in polite conversation with Addison and Steele at Button’s. If you wanted to gamble, the Young Man’s was a good bet; if experimental natural philosophy was your thing, Royal ...”

“... another five years, despite continuing tensions over loan repayments and the warning of its boss, John Hope Simpson, a former Indian Civil Service official, that the ‘unpleasant duty’ of debt collection and mass evictions would ‘probably lead to revolution’. Yet the League continued to roll out unpopular debt-led development projects. In the early ...”

“... so much to the Americans). Even ‘poor old Notters’ (Alan Clark on the defence secretary John Nott) comes out of it quite well. This is a highly empathetic account of the British campaign, but Freedman doesn’t pretend otherwise. ‘It has expressly not been my task,’ he writes at the start of the second volume, ‘to highlight the failures of ...”

“... a few islands of stability but a great many more archipelagos of uncertainty and confusion; a few major works but a great many more minor works with an obsessive attachment to particularity and a disregard for conventional aesthetics, which are replaced by a spirit of documentary reportage, investigative journalism and idiosyncratic record-keeping. Take the ...”

“... time in the 1810s and 1820s, Wedderburn embodied the possibility of common ground between the two major political causes of the early 19th century, abolitionism and the rights of the working class, and sought to establish ties of support and sympathy between working-class Britons and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. He was notorious as a firebrand and ...”

“... an uproarious visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow by ‘sixteen French socialist workmen’, the orator John Bruce Glasier proclaimed: ‘We are hastening to reach the City of the Commune before night falls.’ But as Forster points out, solidarity with Commune veterans on the part of British working-class movements was usually more symbolic than active. Plenty of ...”

“... but Gelpi is confident that his reassessment of his work, ‘will confirm his place as one of the major British poets of this century’. From the outset, readers of the book are left in little doubt that they are privileged to be witnessing a redemption, a reversal of Day Lewis’s unfortunate fall, with Gelpi casting himself in the role of saviour. Living ...”

“... some of them. Blindness and Insight was his first collection, published in 1971; a second major book, Allegories of Reading, appeared in 1980.* Anyone who has read even a single essay of de Man’s can gauge the quality of his mind. Many of his early pieces circulated as if they were dangerous to the academy, and assured him a samizdat reputation. His ...”

“... Culler’s job is to portray him as a Modern Master – even Thody speaks of Barthes as a ‘major French writer’ without any sort of qualification – and he does this with subtlety and skill. There are many modes of mastery and Culler suggests Barthes possesses ‘a special sort ... suited to experimentation with the intelligibilities of our ...”

“... observing the law – ‘lest terrorists win by inducing a kind of bunker terrorism’. John O’Sullivan emphasises the need to deny them publicity. In the best piece in the book Leszek Kolakowski discusses legitimacy and terrorism, pointing out that the armed struggle of the underground partisans against the Nazi occupation was perfectly ...”

“... Introduction includes some useful biographical facts it cannot balance the loss. Of the major characters, Rajah Amar is gradually and unexpectedly moved into the centre of the action. Buddhist self-discipline has brought him to the point where he feels fitted for withdrawal from the world – once he has fulfilled his last responsibility of ...”

“... of the subgenre, the time-travel narrative, is as exceptional among and uncharacteristic of their major texts as SF itself is with regard to official Literature. To be sure, so-called alternative or counterfactual histories have gained popularity and a certain respectability; my personal favourite is Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain, in which ...”

“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”

“... once they posed a serious threat to the authority of the state. Union density declined in all the major industrial countries at the same time as it did in Britain. The successes Thatcher was able to achieve, in her own terms, in domestic policy were as much a symptom of how the country had changed as a consequence of her desire to change it. After ...”