“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to build an house unto the name of the Lord my God, as the Lord spake unto David my father.This passage is very close indeed to the translation in the Matthew Bible of 1537 (by William Tyndale) and there are just two differences from the King James Bible of 1611 (‘evil occurrent’ in place of ‘any evil plague’; ‘purpose’ for ‘am ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... with brutal and emotionless judgment,’ she says. Only later will she come to sympathise, in a passage that seems inspired by Betty Friedan: ‘How she must have sat in the empty kitchen, the table smelling of the domestic rot of the sponge, and waited for me to clatter in from school, for my father to come home.’ One afternoon, Evie sees a curious group ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... loved of Ezra Pound has been said, and continues to be said, of the poets and poetries loved of Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman – two of the most important and influential of these new American writers. The anthologies edited by Silliman and Douglas Messerli contain a great deal of unpleasant and difficult poetry – for example, this ...”

“... It would be fascinating to know what these looked like and what Vasari meant by ‘simple’ (the passage is not discussed in this book), but the implication seems to be that his usual style would have been wasted on such a public. We know that he despised the sort of realism in which Flemish painters excelled and which, he is supposed to have said, women ...”

“... Heart of Darkness, and ‘ou-boom’, the meaningless echo in the Marabar Caves in Forster’s A Passage to India, the complexity of both Africa and India reduced to hushed, disyllabic sounds. In history and the popular imagination, another two syllables, ‘black hole’, have come to express the idea that, for the Westerner, Calcutta is still beyond ...”

“... incidents in her life to those in his; Fanny Burney much later edited the Memoirs of her father, Charles Burney, introducing material related to herself as incidental. The best models of female autobiography were fictional. Delariviere Manley, who came closest to writing a (defensive) autobiography, produced her short and juicy work under a light fictional ...”