“... 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 ...”

“... alleged misrepresentation, and the sources of that misery, a misery James has yet to experience, may include the thought that not all fishing voyages are wholesome. Patrick McGrath’s first book, which has only just managed to precede his second in British bookshops, has 13 ornate horror stories. Hands sprout from heads, pith-helmets are thereby ...”

“... the fragility of its confidence, however. Mrs Thatcher had shot its fox, improbable fox though it may be. Neil Kinnock was harshly reminded that every government has formidable cards to play in the run-up to a general election. On the eve of Blackpool, an NOP survey for the Independent and BBC 2’s Newsnight showed that, despite the downturn in the ...”

“... taken up by a middle-aged actor belatedly trying to discover what crime or crimes his father may have committed long ago. Geoffrey Elder is introduced as a former friend, now deceased, by Julian Symons himself, who purports merely to have edited the thespian’s posthumous ms. Symons admits to shaping and sharpening the presentation of Elder’s ...”

“... and had reverberations on the Continent because of hostility there towards the Jesuits. Zagorin may go too far in attributing dissimulation to some of the occultists, libertines and unbelievers whom he sees hiding behind esotericism (Sir Walter Raleigh is a case in point), but his central thesis of the pervasiveness of dissimulation in 16th and 17th-century ...”

“... have been perfectly at home in the introduction to a student edition thirty years ago. It may be that the task he sets himself – that of taking proper cognisance of reception aesthetics, current bibliography and the more convincing variants of post-structuralism, while nonetheless producing cheerfully definitive thematic readings – is simply ...”

“... that can occur in coupling, and how the mind registers the light and shade of intimacy, but we may laugh when we come across this: So she loved my butt – and the nape of my neck ... And my lips somewhat, the not-hurtful things. I’m big enough phallically that some people do what she did and widen helplessly. Maybe that is really common. Really, she ...”

“... what Madame du Deffand was not. She was not, whatever the publisher of Benedetta Craveri’s book may claim, a woman who ‘approached love and sex with a frankness centuries ahead of her time’: her time was the 18th-century Regency, which took a casual view of fidelity, and the hedonistic age of Louis XV. She died in the reign of Louis XVI, a couple of ...”

“... that present moment.He’s still alive as he turnsjust a second before the shooting;and so I may tell you his story,not tapping into memory but into time,and refire the first salvo for the endof white hegemony in Central Africa.You must come along. Whether you’re aCaribbean in Brixton able to instruct me,or white middle class in Surrey,or an elderly ...”

“... the dawning of a new age of peace and prosperity. By the time of the Cairo Agreement on 4 May, Rabin’s victory was complete. On 12 May Meron Benvenisti said of the Cairo Agreement in Haaretz: ‘A perusal of hundreds of the Agreement’s pages can leave no doubt about who is the winner and the loser in this ...”

“... As an ultimate philosophical proposition, the case for voluntary euthanasia is strong. Whatever may be said for and against suicide generally, the appeal of death is immeasurably greater when it is sought not for a poor reason or just any reason, but for good cause so to speak; when it is invoked not on behalf of a socially useful person, but on behalf ...”