“... that centuries other than ours had different views on the subject, especially when I came across Charles Wesley’s verses (written in August 1744 on the morrow of a Cardiff Methodist’s funeral) whose rollicking anapaests were widely reprinted for congregational singing: Ah! lovely Appearance of Death!    No Sight upon Earth is so fair Not all the gay ...”

“... States are pertinent here; and Goubert identifies one particularly interesting ‘reverse’ passage on the subject of the body by an English writer on science, S. Parkes, whose book The Chemical Catechism was published in 1818: ‘The human body is itself a laboratory, in which by the various functions of secretion, absorption, etc., composition and ...”

“... the pair (both provincials, of course) whom Kenner singled out as the most honourable exceptions: Charles Tomlinson, who applauded William Soutar, and Basil Bunting, who befriended MacDiarmid. Yet Tomlinson and Bunting are the true mavericks, as Kenner recognised. They are mavericks because, while acknowledging class-based and region-based resentment, in ...”

“... or even as being in love with him, or indeed as in any way acquainted with him. Shearman cites a passage in Petrarch in which the poet observes that ‘even David wept for the deaths of Absalom and of Saul.’ But that hardly supports his case; it merely asserts that even a warrior can have a soft heart. A footnote mentions Boccaccio’s ‘Rime’ in which ...”

“... than a hundred years before people were phoning to complain about Edward Said’s right to write, Charles Dickens was furnishing his new house on the same site, and furnishing his new novel, Bleak House, with characters who struggled to agree about how to live in the world and what to believe. Peter Ackroyd provides a nice picture of the novelist in the ...”

“... conjunctions with change in empires. He noted the rulership of Saturn over India, and copied out a passage of a work deriving from Bacon which said that the law of Mohammed could not last more than 693 years. They were all wrong, although modern America seems slow to absorb this lesson. In England, the Armada prophecies stemmed from predictions of a ...”

“... all British publishing houses with an unrivalled list of authors. Lord Byron, David Livingstone, Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone, Samuel Smiles, Herman Melville and Washington Irving were all published from Albemarle Street. J.M.W. Turner and David Roberts provided illustrations for ...”

“... Rose ended up sewing in a workhouse after her tenth child, Annie, was born. Beatrice married Charles Leaworthy (the brother of Maud’s husband, Walter) in Pontypridd in 1919 and gave birth to Iris one year later, entering into a life of agricultural insecurity in the backwaters of South Wales and the West Country. ...”

“... vocabulary of their own are those by Karlis Racevskis, Pamela Major-Poetzl, and the co-authors, Charles Lemert and Garth Gillan. These books represent interestingly different ways of interpreting Foucault’s work, but by attempting this while Foucault was still productive, they knowingly ran the risk of becoming outdated. For those who think Foucault’s ...”

“... at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted. The president had been thinking about what would happen after the war since 1862, when his generals began to seize swathes of Confederate territory, but had stubbornly resisted the idea that emancipated slaves would have to be given the vote ...”

“... is likely to tell the whole story. Hence Gillray’s serial return to certain characters – Charles Fox, Napoleon, George III, the Prince of Wales, Burke, Sheridan and Pitt. The motive, the posture, the degree of deplorable wheedling would shift even as the character stayed the same.An earlier biographer, Draper Hill, judged that Gillray had ‘lifted ...”

“... I’ve noticed before the strange tendency of hateful buildings to become almost lovable after the passage of decades. Not all of them, of course. Some, like the 1960s highrise clones lining Moscow’s New Arbat (Kalinin Prospekt) become more annoying as they get shabbier. But the Moscow State University building on Lenin Hills, one of Moscow’s seven ...”

“... even two hundred pages later, it resonates with a definite ping. Its status as a key passage could hardly be clearer if it came already marked-up in highlighter pen, fluorescing on the page. O’Neill’s narrator, after mentioning that pearl divers were essentially the property of those who owned the boats, attempts to establish an important ...”

“... without disadvantage or close it without loss. An account of the battle of Crécy, quoted by Sir Charles Oman, speaks of the French knights falling under a hail of English arrows, ‘almost without seeing the men who slew them’. This is exactly what Kelly means by ‘disconnectedness’. Killing ‘from afar’ has long been part of war. In Iraq and Kuwait ...”

“... American women writers at least since the 19th century, a parable of the woman artist’s rite of passage, her necessary separation from the domestic world of maternity and nurture. In Freudian terms, it is about the psychological violence that accompanies the daughter’s transfer of attachment from the mother to the father, and her quest for ...”