“... have argued) because print was disguising its own novelty in pursuit of credibility, but more simply because handwritten texts were the only available model. What else could a printed book look like apart from a manuscript book? It is also in all senses a big book, a tome for the lectern rather than the private study. The Royal edition consists of ...”

“... to Ashbery, rivalling the scope of hero-critics like Saintsbury or Curtius or Auerbach though more giddily adventurous than they were. A few years ago he was maintaining that the parts of the Old Testament attributed to J, the Yahwist (that is, the author who refers to God as Yahveh), were written by a woman at the decadent court of Rehoboam. It seems a ...”

“... the difficulty of even the most apparently simple lyrics. Victorian poetry, she contends, ‘asks more demanding and radical questions of its culture than other genres of the period, experimenting with forms and poetic language commensurate with this complexity’. Readers of Armstrong’s book will not always find it possible to distinguish the opacities of ...”

“... pigs, stands the funerary monument of Robert Burton. Already, it will be noticed, I am giving more information than is strictly necessary. My excuse must be that it is a habit I have caught from Burton himself. A schoolboy, asked to produce a review, is said to have written: ‘This book tells me more than I wish to ...”

“... royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge supported by the likelihood that ‘the press’ in this instance is the National Enquirer, the ...”

“... proved decisive in the face of a narrow, but clear, national majority for the losing candidate. More recently, the State of California has presented another challenge to the straightforwardness of democracy as the rest of the world imagines it, with the proposal to recall an elected governor in possession of an unambiguous and unexpired democratic ...”

“... but not always with ‘my girlfriend’). Writers, on the other hand, are well known to get more than their fair share of such bounty: it’s one of the things for which the world admires them, and/or envies them, and/or hates their guts. And writers don’t often discuss how it feels to hold such freedom, though travelling, idling, quasi-colonial ...”

“... the Scottish words ‘Loch Shiel’ over and over again. The idea seemed to be that this was more ‘religious’, a small Jerusalem moment. The theology tended towards literalism, but a literalism of the spirit rather than of the word: intelligent evangelicism – the church was in a university town. Nobody believed that Genesis was creation’s ...”

“... it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being ...”

“... its quizzical severity: que sais-je? Or so we are told. In practice, though, the essay tends to be more or less the precise opposite of such a sober and responsible self-examination. The writers who have used the form in the questioning spirit – the essayists, from Montaigne to Stanley Cavell, who generate a sense that the act of writing is for them a ...”

“... For several years, until he became Labour leader and had to watch his entry more carefully, Neil Kinnock claimed in Who’s Who to be the author of an anthology of the writings and sayings of Aneurin Bevan entitled What Nye said: each year the supposed publication date was authoritatively amended, although the book has never appeared ...”

“... of Ireland in the 18th Century, but it will find the proximity of works of its own century much more uneasy company. Not only does the title invite endless tutorial discussions on why this particular period should be singled out as the ‘Age of Imperialism and Revolution’, but the meaning of ‘Ireland’ as here discussed opens up a Pandora’s box of ...”

“... is that it is simultaneously political and cultural. This is a mode of argument, but perhaps even more of assumption, which has often seemed alien and unacceptable east of Offa’s Dyke, though its relevance to the English experience can be shown to be just as direct. Within Wales, the two truths, or those versions of them which are reciprocally dismissed as ...”

“... work fulfilled the demands of the moment. The closer any particular past development is to us, the more difficult it is to maintain this historicist commitment to the self-containment of the past: art historians continue to cordon off the early Symbolist Mondrian and the naturalist who continued to paint flowers all his life from the properly Modernist artist ...”

“... leaders and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject ...”