“... under the heading of government in the early Middle Ages. If Dr McKitterick misses some of these vital, day-to-day links between king and followers, she also misses the more exalted of the king’s circle. Her book contains hardly any reference to the function of saints in this society. She does not show how these people turned quite naturally to the ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...”

“... ask when the clothing firm Benetton, by using a photograph on a poster of the dying Aids activist David Kirby, borrowed concern and pity for commercial ends. But the situation is complicated. In other contexts advertising techniques were taken up vigorously by Aids activists. Indeed, a poster was produced showing the same image with the message, ‘There’s ...”

“... less respectable. Yet from Baudelaire onwards, an engagement with contemporary painting has been vital to some of the greatest poets; and the best art critics, aside from those who were primarily artists, have been writers who’ve taken art on as a sideline. Even the rival giants of American art criticism when Fried was a young man, Harold Rosenberg and ...”

“... Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith, Laurence Sterne, Francis Hutcheson and Edmund Burke all made vital Irish contributions to this nouvelle vague of meekness, tendresse, womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The ...”

“... state got bigger, too. The New Deal witnessed a more proactive state determined to shore up the vital economic underpinnings of the American system of liberty. Moreover, participation in two world wars and the Cold War demonstrated that the United States would provide a global defence of the liberal international order on which its own security and ...”

“... currently given over to surveillance but while it probably played no part in rendition it would be vital to the US in any conflict with Iran. So I make the journey north to nowadays not so genteel Harrogate and out into Nidderdale. It’s wet and windy and the protesters, fifty or sixty in number (and also in age mostly) are corralled safely round the gate of ...”

“... of sin. Is this ‘artful whiteface mockery of pious racists’? In his new biography of Wheatley, David Waldstreicher encourages us to think so, and to read the lines in a ‘mocking or satirical instead of a beseeching voice’, so that we can hear Wheatley ‘become the organic intellectual of the enslaved’.The poem shows Wheatley working within narrow ...”

“... of little but worrying about not being taken seriously. Making much of little is, of course, a vital task and one at which jokes excel (though they’re just as good at making little of much). But I can’t think of any Jewish shoe jokes, so perhaps the contributors to this collection of essays had their hands tied. Cultural studies usually makes much of ...”

“... a bit weary of the repeated mantra ‘like Nedham’ or ‘like Milton’ (phrases that blur the vital distinction between a shared vocabulary and a shared mentality), Worden often recreates with real force the charge attached to particular words and phrases in the 1650s and after. Samson Agonistes is made to sound stronger and angrier by being seen as a ...”

“... the people versus la casta. From the outset, Iglesias and his comrades understood that it was vital to know how to operate on hostile media and political terrain. They had to be realistic about the hegemonic strength of Spanish neoliberalism and the gap between what was being said in the streets and squares about the struggles of everyday life and what ...”

“... Heylin’s implied verdict on recent output seems to me just: that though creatively Dylan is as vital as ever, his critical faculties have rather deserted him. It’s been a while since one could claim that, in the words of ‘John Wesley Harding’, ‘he was never known to make a foolish move.’ These lapses were partially redeemed by Biograph (1985) and ...”

“... early 19th century, and collieries gave a general profit return of 30 per cent. This success was vital to the industrial revolution, but it created problems in respect of access to the coal face, safety and transport, all of which called for frequent new ideas. On coal was founded the Victorian city, the key feature of 19th-century social life, as the ...”

“... the lighter cavalry (Mlle de Scudéry, Voltaire, Alfieri, Nathaniel Lee, Gavin Hamilton, J.-L. David). However, Donaldson sharply registers the enormous popularity of the myth across the centuries, and the ways in which controversy has enlivened and enlarged it rather than killing it off. Readings of a myth become part of the myth, as Lévi-Strauss said of ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”