“... were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry ...”

“... France, seems plausible. If these figures are accepted, it would make the battle less of a David and Goliath struggle than is popularly assumed. Curry also gives a good account of Agincourt’s after-life in Shakespeare’s Henry V, and in myth, legend, literature and propaganda, and describes the attempts made by the French to explain away the strange ...”

“... Your spectator is sitting not only In your theatre, but also In the world. ‘I live​ in dark times,’ Brecht said, but he liked to believe the darkness would end. In the poem containing those words, written in the 1930s, he apologises to ‘those born after’, saying that Hatred, even of meanness Makes you ugly. Anger, even at injustice Makes your voice hoarse ...”

“... have toyed with this idea when he was opposition leader between 1997 and 2001. But neither he nor David Cameron were brutal and ambitious enough to go for it. No one seems very interested in an English parliament and few people think much of Cameron’s ‘English votes for English laws’ amendments to Commons standing orders. The mass mobilisation of the ...”

“... It’​s hard not to read the title of Mieko Kawakami’s first novel, Breasts and Eggs, as some kind of provocation. I keep seeing them in front of me – a perverted breakfast, breasts over easy, with a side of ketchup. What are they doing there, those breasts and eggs? It turns out this is misleading: the eggs are the kind that give human life. But the title is appropriate ...”

“... wealth on art. There were similar attacks all over Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans.David Freedberg, who teaches art history at Columbia (and who was, long ago, my dissertation adviser), describes himself as ‘haunted’ by the question of what it is about art that arouses such fierce responses. Most academic art history considers the social ...”

“... Why should​ poets’ deaths carry more weight than those of others? David Markson’s litany of deaths, This Is Not a Novel, starts off with a poet’s death (Byron’s) and expands to commemorate, in laconic sentences and judicious fragments, the deaths (sprinkled with quotes and quirks) of novelists, painters, composers, philosophers ...”

“... Change’. These pieces, together with McFarlane’s insightful work from the 1940s, David Morgan’s from the 1990s and a later Catto piece on ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the 15th Century’, are his lodestars. The Henry he gives us is largely familiar: deeply religious, just in temperament, firm and busily active in points of ...”

“... of which he is a member, is no longer the able and principled Dominic Grieve (who was dismissed by David Cameron to placate his Europhobe backbenchers) but an inexperienced barrister MP, Jeremy Wright. Whatever the reason, the government has chosen, at considerable public expense, to die in a legal ditch and has now ended up legislatively where it could have ...”

“... out of Ixtepec, a Oaxacan town on the overland migrant route. It looked like a location from a David Lynch movie. The entrance was festooned with orange and black ribbons, pumpkins, plastic gnomes, scarecrows and witch effigies. By the door, a raccoon scrabbled desperately on a metre-long chain. In the reception area a wooden rocking chair and a pair of ...”

“... answer would include the English victory at Neville’s Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the tide turned even earlier, in 1332, at the ...”

“... coral towards the surface is a way of tracking the even slower subsidence of the ocean floor. As David Dobbs observed in Reef Madness (2005), Darwin’s account of atoll formation has similarities with his later theory of natural selection. Tiny creatures can build islands; minute variations can create species. Both theories offer a natural-historical ...”

“... government had been voted out of office in 1984, and the incoming Labour administration of David Lange did at least begin to take the Crown’s obligations under the Te Tiriti (the 1840 treaty between the British and the Māori) seriously. The Waitangi Tribunal, through its major 1986 report on the preservation of Te Reo (the Māori language), had also ...”

“... Christian martyrs, monks, Abelard and Héloïse, the troubadours, Dante. Next she moves on to David Hume, Goethe, Byron, Casanova, before concluding with a smattering of Netflix scripts and YouTube comments. Is this a history of love? Or a history of certain ideas about love? As the historian of China Eugenia Lean has argued, the ‘single ...”

“... of narrative, in other words, raises the problem of what, if anything, persists over time. David Hume thought for a while that nothing did; others have proposed the soul, the body, the brain and so on. Whatever the candidate, fictional narratives might help us to see continuity in ways other than the straightforwardly linear. What lends Middlemarch or ...”