“... suppose and admire, and upon occasion celebrate, but do not call in question or discuss.’ Thus Robert Boyle, progenitor of English science, in A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature, 1686. Boyle found eight meanings for the word, and pretty much suggested we scrap the lot. No one paid him any heed. Nature is too deeply entrenched in our ...”

“... travelled from Dublin to London to finish Gulliver’s Travels, spending part of this period at Alexander Pope’s villa in Twickenham (affectionately known as Twitnam) alongside the poet John Gay. This summer was, Grant claims, ‘one of the most consequential in English literary history’. Not only did the men breakfast on ‘bread and ...”

“... by Mark Thornton Burnett’s edition of the plays for Everyman in 1999, and Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey’s for Penguin in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the biographers’ Marlowe is ...”

“... trotz alledem/Dass rings der Mensch die Bruderhand/dem Menschen reicht trotz alledem.’ It’s Robert Burns. ‘It’s coming yet, for a’ that,/That Man to Man the warld o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that.’ The poet who translated it, Ferdinand Freiligrath, was soon driven out of Germany into exile. He was one of countless thousands across Europe ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...”

“... press would immediately label as evidence of kleptocracy if they happened in another country. Robert Jenrick remains housing secretary despite admitting ‘apparent bias’ in overruling planning inspectors and the local council to approve Richard Desmond’s Westferry Printworks development – 24 hours before the introduction of hefty new levies that ...”

“... A more pluralistic version of her book would bring in the satires of David Lyndsay, the poetry of Alexander Hume and the boisterous, incisive prose of John Knox, who pushed forward the Scottish Reformation while being open to English perspectives. There is a paradox behind the paradox on which this book is based, which is that it objects to the occlusion of ...”

“... easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just now.’ Although Zionist leaders could turn these anti-semitic notions to their own ...”

“... of it in the musical about him, but if American protectionism is the legacy of any one man, it is Alexander Hamilton. As early as 1782, writing in the Continentalist, he declared that ‘to preserve the balance of trade in favour of a nation ought to be a leading aim of its policy.’ Imposts on trade were ‘one of the most eligible species of ...”

“... and the other artists who could be considered Yiddish modernists – the painters Nathan Altman, Robert Falk and, for a time, El Lissitzky, the composers Lev Pulver and Moshe Milner, the writer who called himself Der Nister – were defined by the struggle to integrate these two tendencies. ‘Our first imprimatur is our modernism, our leftism and our ...”

“... to the households of wealthy Catholic families in Lancashire. This goes back to the will of Alexander Hoghton, who in 1581 left his musical instruments and his ‘play clothes’ to Sir Thomas Hesketh along with a request that he treat ‘William Shakeshafte’ well. Honigmann argues that Shakeshafte was Shakespeare, and that he might have passed from ...”

“... expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside the ...”

“... 20 May 1910. The king’s sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was Edward’s least favourite nephew, Wilhelm II of Germany. Wilhelm loved and admired the British and they loved the kaiser: to ...”

“... It was reading Robert Lowell that brought me to poetry at the age of 19, in 1976. I had borrowed a friend’s omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, and something in me said: ‘This is it!’ I don’t remember the poem I first had that response to, but most likely it was in Part IV of Life Studies, ‘Dunbarton’ or ‘For Sale’, or perhaps ‘Waking in the Blue ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”