“... only time they get to visit the seaside, even though their homes in the Occupied Territories may be no more than twenty or thirty kilometres away. There are draconian restrictions on the movement of Palestinians living in the West Bank (the residents of Gaza live in an open-air prison of their own). Yet every year, during Eid al-Fitr at the end of ...”

“... By​ far the worst appointment made by Boris Johnson in his cabinet reshuffle last month was that of Anne-Marie Trevelyan as secretary of state for international development. An ardent Brexiteer, Trevelyan has no known interest in overseas development; just about her only previous public utterance on the subject was an observation that ‘charity begins at home ...”

“... 1919 put it, ‘Einstein Theory Triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.’ But still. But still. Quantum theory suggests that there is a vanishingly small chance that a kettle full of water on the hob will freeze rather than boil. This is disturbing, if only in a vanishingly small way. And if the stars are ...”

“... on the head. As is the way with new historicist interpretation, both expositions proceed by relating a crux in the play to a prominent item in the surrounding or preceding non-literary culture; in these cases, theological and religious culture. In the chapter on Othello the external correlative, or stimulus, is the opinion in moral theology, going ...”

“... and pamphlets easily surpasses in size (and in price) the principal older collections edited by F.C. Mather and Edward Royle, although for the hardy there remains a less easily available set put together by Dorothy Thompson, the doyenne of Chartist studies. Claeys is a past master of the art of compilation, having ...”

“... that such bird viruses might have the ability to change and infect other species. It was feared by chicken farmers. It spread rapidly in flocks and was a killer. Birds at the near end of a hen-house would all be dead, those in the middle dying, some with swollen heads and diarrhoea and others just falling without ...”

“... recent history, or one which achieved so much in so narrow a window of time. The press was founded by a 26-year-old physician-poet from what was then Rhodesia called Stuart Montgomery, the author of a remarkable long poem entitled Circe, adapted loosely from the Odyssey and clearly influenced by Basil Bunting. If Fulcrum had ...”

“... span); at the present rate of production – two volumes per half year – the full text should be available by the end of 1981. The editors have decided, partly because of financial considerations, not to append notes or an index to the individual volumes. This contrasts with Grieg’s version, where the racy and ...”

“... War is concerned, we have for long been accustomed to seeing the frailties of the leaders exposed by zealous commentators. Montgomery was too cautious to be able to exploit victory; Churchill was like a schoolboy in his enthusiasm for wild and ill-considered schemes (as when, discovering ...”

“... to enter occupations – telephone or television repairs, Pacific Gas – which they consider to be ‘hot’ sexually? ‘We’ve reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolical conveniences,’ said Isherwood in A Single Man. ‘The Europeans hate us because we’ve retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into ...”

“... studies, and it hovers over much of this book. Five of the essays, including a splendid piece by Barbara Everett on epic catalogues, are on Milton. Eliot made a major contribution to the ‘dislodgement’ of Milton, but Milton studies never even faltered. Indeed, important books like Ricks’s Milton’s Grand Style were conceived of as counterblasts to ...”

“... days that followed much was done to pursue the ‘softly softly’ approach preferred, not just by British police tradition, but by the anti-terrorist squads of the last decade. As the terrorists’ identity – Arabs from the Iranian south-western region of Khuzestan – and their goals – autonomy for the homeland they ...”

“... Carlyle, already the translator of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, was invited by Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, to ‘Germanise the public’. Jeffrey issued the invitation cautiously, even negatively, asking Carlyle to temper his enthusiasm for ‘your German divinities’ – an enthusiasm he could scarcely understand, let ...”

“... Sutcliffe, but to understand ourselves. Such help is at hand in a historical work, published by chance during the trial. Roger Smith’s history of the conflict between medical and legal discourses in the insanity trials of the 19th century is ‘relevant’ in a way he could never have anticipated or, in this tragic instance, have wished. His book is ...”

“... with its economic misfortunes. Yet the most esteemed theorist of economic recovery seems to be the early 19th-century French populariser of Adam Smith known to Marx as ‘the inane Jean-Baptiste Say … [who] refutes himself again’. The most successful recent guide to the economy – a work called Wealth and Poverty, described ...”