“... nation’. Ransom had recruited scholars and writers like Roger Shattuck, Donald Carne-Ross, William Arrowsmith and others who would have been more likely to land in the Ivy League or the great state universities. So Middleton wasn’t wanting for company. The poet David Wevill was a long-time friend and neighbour. The brilliant Swedish poet and fiction ...”

“... work whilst men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes. It is a prospect to make William Morris’s mind reel, publishers quail. But who are, or were, the Khazars? ‘An autonomous and powerful tribe, a warlike and nomadic people who appeared from the East at an unknown date, driven by a scorching silence, and who, from the seventh to the ...”

“... us with faith in aesthetic immediacy. In making this argument, Steiner is falling in with a broad array of contemporary artists and thinkers. He enlists the Modernists Braque and Wittgenstein in his epigraphs, but his criticism of art for art’s sake, aesthetic narcissism, and the sterility of Modernist formalism, links him more closely to ...”

“... or snow-shoes, they rubbed their hands, they bellowed at one another and lit cigars, they escorted broad-hipped women. Pensioners, they were on a seasonable outing to a place where all or any of them might have served as licensed murderers. As part of an attempt to ‘reach the mystery of German behaviour in the Hitler period’ this doesn’t promise ...”

“... it was natural for Haig to suppose that he would be the one to take the weight of the world on his broad shoulders. The trouble was that the Reagan concept of the Presidency involved the total management of his time, and of access to him, by a small group of trusted advisers, whose notion of Presidential priority for domestic affairs did not include the idea ...”

“... was largely fiscally neutral, did suggest a government that had lost its grip: not so much on broad policy as on crucial details, ones the electorate is likely to remember. It managed to offend many people in the pursuit of very little, while also suggesting a cabinet out of its depth. This is the least experienced Conservative or Liberal government in ...”

“... committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke) with substantial Puritan affiliations. He himself must have been aware that the public theatres had enemies – and supporters – in both the Puritan and Anglican camps. Miss Heinemann sets out to distinguish Puritan ...”

“... were ‘gnawing away at images as if they wished to devour their feet’. Two centuries later, William Hogarth’s disturbing etching Enthusiasm Delineated, produced between 1760 and 1762, shows parishioners with simian features devouring statuettes of Christ. Hogarth, a deist, was attacking both icon worship and the sacrament of the Eucharist, tarring ...”

“... rises to the challenge admirably, sensitively balancing his subject’s idiosyncrasy against his broad representative character. Monty’s codicological studies are outlined but not examined, since that task has been definitively carried out by R.W. Pfaff of the University of North Carolina. Nor, although he devotes a chapter to them, has Mr Cox a great deal ...”

“... a pragmatist who saw war as the test of manhood, and when Benda drew dubious comparisons between William James’s ‘will to believe’ and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’. Yet at the time Benda’s book appeared, the pragmatic philosopher John Dewey was advocating pacifism and renouncing the nationalistic illusions that had led him to support America’s ...”

“... of the mid-Forties got the Third Programme right straight off. The BBC’s Director-General, William Haley, credited himself with having created the network by two decisions. Programmes should take as long as they needed to, and not be curtailed to make way for, say, a fixed news bulletin. Schedulers were urged to be as creative as they liked with an ...”

“... that is, it was (English) national rather than merely metropolitan – imbued with the spirit of William Morris, enthusiastic for the new idea of a decentralising, anti-statist, bottom-up Guild Socialism. Ironically, various New Age luminaries, notably G.D.H. Cole, became some of the Statesman’s most prolific and influential contributors. Indeed the New ...”

“... and a craving for absolute power’. The first wave of professional academic historians, notably William Stubbs and his pupil T.F. Tout, did much to illuminate the mechanisms of Richard’s rule but they found the conundrum of his personality hard to solve. Stubbs felt that Richard’s sudden imposition of autocracy in the summer of 1397, after nearly a ...”

“... ladies like Cecilia Gallerani and Ginevra de’ Benci (both seemingly sexier than the sallow, broad-browed Gioconda) not catch the collective imagination as she did? One answer is that during the 19th century – the key period in her route to celebrity, according to Sassoon – the Gioconda was drawing the crowds in Paris, while Cecilia and Ginevra were ...”

“... janitor whose asthma was exacerbated when he brushed rugs). The patent was bought and exploited by William H. Hoover, whose product revolutionised domestic cleaning. But three-quarters of a century later the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ was suggesting that things had gone too far: infections in early life mean fewer allergies later and a little bit of dirt is a ...”