“... again as a world power. Henry Stimson, Roosevelt’s war secretary, took a different view. So did Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice, though Jackson was clear that ‘you must put no man on trial under forms of a judicial proceeding if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty … the world yields no respect for courts that are organised ...”

“... points’ might have. As he wrote in the characteristically self-effacing preface, ‘the subject may appear an insignificant one, but we shall see that it possesses some interest; and the maxim de minimis non curat lex [‘the law does not concern itself with trifles’] does not apply to science.’ Nor does it apply to history. In the letters of a single ...”

“... in the medical term ‘proud flesh’. Therefore, whatever Shakespeare intended, the most we may reasonably argue is that both readings are possible; or to put it more strongly, that the two readings are not separable. It should be emphasised, however, that there is no evidence that anyone before 1780 ever read the word as anything but ...”

“... of this kind was the conviction that Pound had undergone a fundamental change of heart in Pisa. Robert Fitzgerald, reviewing the Pisan Cantos in the New Republic in August 1948, was glad to find the poet ‘for the first time expressing a personal desolation and a kind of repentance’. The trick was to imagine a desolation so extreme that, whatever Pound ...”

“... after 9/11, of America’s spirit of civic and national resolve; and, for neo-conservatives in May 2003, the spirit of the ‘motivating hopefulness of America’ when Bush was confidently declaring the end of the Iraq war. None of these readings is exactly wrong, but behind the idea that Whitman can be all things to all people lies a more productive ...”

“... of the family worried about propriety and suppressed unflattering information. Sometimes we may forgive them. Arnold’s wife Fanny Lucy (‘Flu’) struck out all favourable references to herself – exactly why? At other times we encounter outright lies or convenient omissions. Matthew skipped out on his sister Jane’s wedding to William Forster of ...”

“... has developed, beginning with the founding Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the form of which may have been influenced by the 1729 English translation of the Tractatus that was in Benjamin Franklin’s library, a collection used for reference by the framers of the Constitution. Spinoza’s prospectus for a post-Jewish and post-Christian world was part of ...”

“... Hugh Dalton observed that no good book ever got written between division bells. Crosland may have benefited from an enforced sabbatical. The Future of Socialism is not an academic study, however. The energy it conveys comes from the sense of its author as somebody recently bloodied in battle, waiting for the next push. Nor should Crosland be seen as ...”

“... Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National Organiser for the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, extending our concerns to a campaign against the use of napalm. I had stood for the Greater ...”

“... cause in Spain in 1936 she wrote to a friend: ‘I feel it is my duty not to do my duty.’ In May 1935 the bank Blake had been working for in Paris collapsed in circumstances which meant its top officials might go to jail. Blake fled to America with his mother and Stead. He had been overworked and unsatisfied by the world of banking; now, they ...”

“... academy, McGann responds to its changing sub-cultures: by 1990 his prose was harder to read, and may have become vaguer instead of merely seeming so. But in his central stand on history he has given little if any ground. He has little in common with the Califomian style of so-called New Historicism, with its reliance on over-general propositions attributed ...”

“... to Nathaniel Haynes’s History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois (Cincinnati, 1915). And he may be the only 20th-century reader of The Biography of Elder Brown Warren Stone written by himself, with Additions and Reflections by Elder John Rogers (Cincinnati, 1847). He describes the way you could make out the shape of his uncle’s toes through the ...”

“... on to describe Shakespeare’s Dream as, in effect, performing a function analogous to that of Robert Bly’s ‘men’s movement’: the male anxieties revealed by Foreman and de Maisse about being ruled by this dubiously sexy old woman are imaginatively soothed through the conquest of the Amazon queen, Hippolyta, and the erotic humiliation of the fairy ...”

“... and concerns of the near-nonsensical Cave of Spleen episode in The Rape of the Lock. The fact that Robert Southey wrote enthusiastically about Taylor in his Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (1831) doesn’t do much to establish the Water-Poet as an unacknowledged influence either; although he does briefly quote from Sir Gregory Nonsence, Southey is ...”

“... of ‘Architecture or Revolution’, which concludes Vers une architecture: the architect ‘may have to emulate the Futurists’ or ‘technological culture’ may ‘go on without him’. As Whiteley argues, this revision of modern architecture was not only academic: to study Futurist history was also a way for ...”