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“... in ever-increasing numbers, until quite quickly most of them were Protestants. Such a person was William Malden of Newington near Chelmsford, who in the late 1530s or early 1540s became so excited on hearing the New Testament being read to him in English that he decided he would have to learn to read it for himself, did so, purchased his own New ...”

“... a final jump – through the paper hoop of Norman Mailer’s ‘faction’ – into the company of Thomas Pynchon and Thomas Berger. One of his propositions is that ‘as far as the intellectuals are concerned, the prophecy that a literature of the West would emerge to liberate America from European and ...”

“... prose. For learned disputes had gentlemanly antecedents, and so had learned fabrications; even Thomas Warton was guilty, and he was the author of the standard History of English Poetry, a work some Shakespeare hunters saw as a model for their much desired history of English drama. The deceits practised by the 19th-century forgers were more ...”

“... William Godwin’s​ attack on aristocratic oppression in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice didn’t pull its punches. ‘Each man,’ he wrote, ‘should be wise enough to govern himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is, that we should have as little of it, as the general peace of society will permit ...”

“... that determine character began to turn into slightly better grounded talk about nerves and brains. William Harvey discovered how the blood circulates in the human body. There was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of ...”

“... inaccessible to us, she had helped the dizzy little person carry on a love affair with a courtier, Thomas Culpepper. She passed on letters and misled and misdirected Catherine’s other attendants; while the lovers got down to business, she snoozed in a chair. Whatever emotion she felt when she found herself sentenced to death, it can’t have been ...”

“... them.’ The innovators to whom he refers are those American poets – Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and others – whose work and moral example have been of importance to his own growth as a writer. The sentence quoted above, with its tinge of elegy and irony, occurs in the fourth and final chapter of Tomlinson’s new, brief book of ...”

“... of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction to, a common adherence to absolutes. Her ...”

“... and Shakespeare and Donne, through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were the stanzas of a ...”

“... They are dangerous terms because they tempt us to lump writers like Muriel Spark and Alice Thomas Ellis together, especially when there are other alluring points of comparison, such as a characteristic tone which at first can seem no more than coolly ironic, and even – in these latest books – some clear similarities of plot (both novels touch on ...”

“... where it has not been evasive. While the Dutch, in whose annals the annexation of Britain by William of Orange is a less momentous occurrence, have been celebrating it without inhibition, the response of the Mother of Parliaments was to provide a poky exhibition in the Banqueting House which was taken off before the anniversary of ...”

“... through the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scots cleric and enlightened historian William Robertson traced the operation in human history of a superintending providence working indirectly through natural secondary causes: ‘The Supreme Being conducteth all his operations by general laws.’ Robertson’s famous sermon, The Situation of the ...”

“... were now distant relations. No one knew what things should cost, and market manipulation was rife. William Cokke, carrying some corn in his hand for show, walked round Newgate market talking loudly about the outrageous price of wheat, which he claimed could not be got for less than 21 pence a bushel; the real price was 18 pence and he was sent to the ...”

“... would not see up her skirt. It was a gesture at once gracious and gruesome, and the verse that Sir Thomas Wyatt (probably) wrote on the occasion from the Tower of London is equally dark (‘circa Regna tonat’ means ‘it thunders around the throne’): The bell towre showid me suche syght That in my head stekys day and nyght There dyd I lerne out of A grate ...”

“... the left-wing Henry Wallace from remaining vice president. ‘Who the hell is Harry Truman?’ William Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff, asked. ‘I hardly know Truman,’ Roosevelt said. ‘He has been over here a few times, but he made no particular impression on me.’ Roosevelt would see Truman only twice during his fourth term, and he kept his vice ...”