“... was a poet who liked jokes. That’s not unusual in itself, but she also wrote on topics that may disgust you, or ones that you may think funny poetry ordinarily has no right to address: disease, decay, physical humiliation and several kinds of disability, among them her own. In 1988 she learned that she had multiple ...”

“... in 1881, Pierre Lachèze in 1900 and Jim Jones in 1967. The end of the great plague of 2020 may be in sight, but doomsday predictions come thick and fast these days. The ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the election of Donald Trump, the Mayan calendar cataclysm of 2012, the ‘clash of civilisations’, the millennium bug, all looked – or look, to ...”

“... In May​ 1937, troops under Italian command moved into the remote area around the monastery of Debre Libanos in Ethiopia. They had been sent there by Rodolfo Graziani, one of the commanders of the Italian invasion of the country in October 1935 and now the viceroy of Italian East Africa. In February 1937 he had survived an assassination attempt in Addis Ababa ...”

“... The decision to begin the volume in 1727, at the accession of George II, is not defended and may be questioned: it lands us slightly awkwardly after the Hanoverian succession and in the middle of Walpole’s long period in office. Ireland and Scotland are pushed into the background. The Black Hole of Calcutta, so fearful an event to previous ...”

“... ones. But the detail is fascinating. The speed with which changes took place suggests that fashion may have a constant velocity. And animadversions on the dress of the young, on the importation of foreign styles, the extravagance of women and the death of decency, speedily follow change. The most recent example of sumptuary law in this country (Second World ...”

“... chapel at Shrewsbury. Shelley and Byron condemned or satirised war in their own styles. Blake may deserve the palm. He saw and heard in imagination, as we can do with less effort now: Albion’s mountains run with blood, the cries of war and of tumult Resound into the unbounded night. And he had the same sympathy for enemy France, where ‘the pale ...”

“... than anyone else to the intoxicating vanity inspired by the ‘mass media’. I suspect that Eco may have first been seduced from intellectual caution, if not modesty, by the righteous cause of ‘relevance’ (a word much in favour when the earlier of these essays appeared) – a cause which Medievalists may be driven to ...”

“... the enduring and improbable stereotype of the journalist-as-hero). Writers, directors and actors may be forgiven for misrepresenting the minutiae of the life of a journalist: they may not, after all, be lucky enough to observe the proprietor, the editor and the reporter, from life. But the one area of which they do have ...”

“... that Bermejo was himself a ‘New Christian’ and that hostility from ‘Old Christians’ may have been one of the reasons for his frequent displacements. The 1468 contract for Saint Michael, only discovered in the 1960s, reveals that Bermejo had been a citizen of Valencia since the early 1460s. The city was the largest port in the western ...”

“... local health authorities.’ The British government has taken a keen interest in the matter. On 11 May, Boris Johnson, teasing the return of televised sport, called it ‘a much needed boost to the nation’s morale’. The Telegraph reported that ministers were ‘demanding’ that games be broadcast at 3 p.m. on Saturdays, and that they should be ‘free to ...”

“... Bunting in Tenerife and Julian Bell at Wuhan University! Mr Fussell, who has a fondness for what may be termed enumerative criticism, produces a long list of such displacements. And all through the Twenties and Thirties this Sehnsucht remains rampant and the flight goes on – England at peace being even harder to take than England at war. Auden and MacNeice ...”

“... the naturalistic novel. Since the age of Bradley and the novel is now receding into the past, we may begin to see why its sophisticated criticism failed to make sense of ‘traditional narratives’. Fairy-tales and romances are not concerned with character, as Bradley understood it; and their stories often violate the canons of probability and Johnsonian ...”

“... and fixed despite variations of economic circumstances (e.g. the 50-50 split in share-cropping) may call for a more radical departure in the structure of economic theory than Bliss and Stern attempt. The role of the price mechanism itself needs re-examination. Similarly, the concept of ‘efficiency’, which Bliss and Stern employ quite extensively, is ...”

“... one kind of ordinary human or another. ‘He never doubted the man you would grow into,’ Aunt May says, reinforcing the point. A little later she delivers the film’s best-known line: ‘You’re not Superman, you know.’ Indeed he’s not, but he’s closer to being Superman than Aunt May can possibly think; a ...”

“... fuse in his passage on swifts, for example, which ‘come back each year, in the last week of May’ to his old home somewhere in the south country – a fact which interested me, because I have recorded their arrival since the 1950s in Aberdeen on 11 May and in Cumbria on 6 May. His ...”