“... is her only physical link with childhood. Watson struggles to write an endless Latin letter to the Bishop of Winchester to prove his sanity. There is a terrible reality, too, in the abruptness with which the crises occur. Watson’s sacking from Stockwell School seems almost as inexplicable to the reader as it is to him. And when his mind finally ...”

“... Irish, judicious and unmalicious, is a joy to read. The title phrase, which may be traced back to Bishop Berkeley via Yeats, was quoted by Denis Donoghue in his Crane Bag essay (LRB, 21 April-4 May 1983); the essay reappears here (slightly shortened), but with the phrase extracted and expanded into an opening article, in which it and its implications are ...”

“... To Bartolomé de Las Casas, however, another Dominican, later Protector of the Indians and Bishop of Chiapa in Yucatan, the line was too fine. ‘False testimony, a contrived argument for tyranny,’ he scribbled in the margin of one of the judgments. And the judgments, inherently unsteady, did not last. For in 1519-22 Cortes stumbled on what seemed to ...”

“... best that can be said on behalf of Mr Derek Pattinson, the Secretary-General of the Synod, and Mr James Shelley, the Secretary to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present ...”

“... edicts against it (it was getting in the way of archery and other martial pursuits). In 1457, James II of Scotland decreed that ‘fute-ball and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while Henry VIII made football a penal offence. Under Elizabeth I, the Grand Jury of Middlesex held that it was ‘an unlawful game, a great affray likely to result in homicides ...”

“... in their exotic spear-waving poses. It was some relief to see the paperback of James Fox’s excellent White Mischief with its measured exposure of the shallow callous daftness of settler society circa 1940, popping cheekily up among them. Nairobi is still Africa’s safari capital, where the lucky tourist is offered all kinds of trips to ...”

“... his fiercely sharpened pencil) was the only one of the Board who had made him nervous (the Bishop was a sweetie), so it was a blessing that on this particular morning, thanks to Canon Treacher’s precautions, the priest remained unaware of his presence. The worst tack a priest could adopt at a service such as this, and a trap Treacher was pretty ...”

“... owed the chair of logic and metaphysics which he obtained at Glasgow in 1751 to the lobbying of James Oswald MP, the son of his legal guardian during his childhood, the continuing support of Henry Home and, possibly, the backing of the Duke of Argyll. And, as Phillipson stresses, we should not discount the importance of his lecturing successes in ...”

“... launches Robert Bartlett’s massive, erudite compendium of saint lore. Bartlett never cites the bishop’s answer, which is that feats performed from beyond the grave vindicate faith in the resurrection. The martyrs who so publicly and bloodily died for their faith are alive in eternity. Their miracles prove their truth. To late antique pagans, however, as ...”

“... Hogarth’, exemplified in particular in a critique of his work by the Irish painter and critic James Barry. Acknowledging Hogarth’s merit – his ‘admirable fund of invention’, the moral quality of his satire, ‘seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way’ – Barry had nevertheless claimed that his ‘general aim’ was not to ‘reach ...”

“... Some of the best buildings are those which record pure Yankee ingenuity: the Octagon Barn of the James L. and Cora Purdy Farm, for example, which is 100 feet in diameter and has 48 foot high walls – a machine for automated cattle-feeding. And there are things which might be ignored if they did not take place on an American scale, like the Breughelish scene ...”

“... undergraduate (as I was almost fifty years later) with F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop, at a time of what seems now like relatively uncomplicated Wasp hegemony there and in the arts generally. His ties with that university remained deep, not only through his literary friends, but also through Christian Gauss, the dean of the college, an ...”

“... Among its officers and members were Tennyson, Gladstone, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, William James, Henri Bergson, and scores of other persons with unimpeachable intellectual and social credentials. In the 18th century, the foundations of received Christian faith, undermined by deism, had been shored up for some time by the physico-theology of ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who lived ...”

“... in charge at home as queen regent. She took to the role with panache: when the Scottish King James IV tried to exploit Henry’s absence by declaring war, Catherine revealed a decisive gift for organisation, masterminding the equipping and dispatch of English forces north. She even commissioned a jewelled armoured helmet and set out for Scotland ...”