“... its benediction. He wd/ have put in the cart. There is poetry in the white oxen (all the more, perhaps, for the cart’s omission), and humility. The poet, as Read put it, ‘contemplates the world of nature as the source of possible redemption.’ More solid even than the oxen, in moral and poetic terms, was ...”

“... On Man, his main conclusion was that human actions are, from a physical point of view, no more mysterious than the workings of an intricate clock. He saw no reason, as he put it in the Discourse on Method in 1637, to think that the human body had any powers beyond those of the marvellous ‘self-moving machines or automata that can be made by human ...”

“... Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies. His wife sings a nymphomaniacal song about him ‘fiddling’, which is ...”

“... milke’, ‘pore woman Fruterers’ and ‘ancient poore fishwifes’. The Elizabethan writer Thomas Lodge recalled a performance of a play that might have been a forerunner of Hamlet in which a ghost cried ‘Hamlet, revenge!’ in miserable tones like those of ‘an oyster-wife’. Selling food on the streets was one of the few public economic ...”

“... and not likely to take on the question ‘compared to what’? Was Genghis Khan or Sultan Selim more important in ‘making the modern world’? Inventions or constitutions? Slave revolts or the British navy? Tea or drugs? Maths or ‘play’? A reader scanning bookshop shelves understands that such titles are just a way of saying that a particular ...”

“... a model – youth, maturity, ageing. In the early 19th century the English architectural antiquary Thomas Rickman looked at the changing styles of medieval Gothic windows and came up with the terms ‘Early English’, ‘Decorated’ and ‘Perpendicular’: church-crawlers still use that shorthand, not thinking much about the implied pessimism. An early ...”

“... also a dubious one: ‘Laws are made by men, interpreted by men, and enacted by men … Law can no more rule us by itself, without human agency, than a cannon can dominate a city without an ironmonger to cast it and an artilleryman to load, point and fire it.’Since laws are not self-executing, one concern is that the ideal of the rule of law becomes the rule ...”

“... a poet without learning, warbling his ‘native woodnotes wild’. Jonson and Milton both knew far more Latin and Greek than Shakespeare, so perhaps they could afford such judgments. I am not sure that we can do so today. There is clear evidence that Shakespeare read and remembered Ovid’s Latin and was not confined to English translations. He alludes to or ...”

“... to refer to ‘Brontë country’ or ‘Hardy country’. The Lake District belongs to Wordsworth more than to any landowner. But ‘Hemingway country’? He lived in at least thirty parts of the United States, not to mention Cuba, Paris and the Riviera. Stephen Crane’s birthplace is now a children’s playground in New Jersey, William Faulkner’s a ...”

“... comparatively retired, almost obscure.’ Nicolson’s loyal and royal life was thus more a triumph of will than of empathy, of tact rather than tolerance. And although it was received with great acclaim as the first word on the subject, in the nature of things it could scarcely be the last. By contrast, Kenneth Rose’s superb biography will ...”

“... if he is interested in contemporary matters) will find himself dredging through the pages of more or less hagiographic ‘house histories’ and the nuts-and-bolts trade material to be found in the weekly columns of the Bookseller. Direct approaches to publishers and agents (though some are helpful) are commonly turned away. And, one suspects, many ...”

“... the earl on every continent except Antarctica, and grisly accounts of his death, as well as some more thoughtful studies of the case and what it reveals about postwar Britain and its social structure. Thompson’s book is a mixture of all of these and the result is persuasive and revealing in some parts, absurd and tasteless in others. Yet it is a ...”

“... week in a drama whose cast included and united most of the nation, and which therefore was a much more significant play, and culturally more central, than anything by Shakespeare. It was in 1662 that a century of argument about the book’s form and content were settled, and that form remained unchallenged until ...”

“... and police. In all, 32 white settlers died in the rebellion. For their part, the British hanged more than 1000 Kikuyu, detained at least 150,000 and, according to official figures, killed around 12,000 in combat, though the real figure, in David Anderson’s view, is ‘likely to have been more than 20,000’. In ...”

“... to America’s founding: Southern colonies refused to ratify the Declaration of Independence until Thomas Jefferson struck out a clause attacking the slave trade; the constitution counted each slave as three-fifths of a person in the Federal census, granting slave owners disproportionate representation in Congress; the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri and ...”