“... optimism of some of the earlier reformers. A recent impressive book by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village,* suggested that Calvinist theology became especially acceptable to parish élites, the minority who were prospering in the great economic divide of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as against the mass ...”

“... Hunt does, he does well. But as the writings of History Workshop or the essays on Wales edited by David Smith under the title A People and a Proletariat show, there is more to labour history than is contained in this ...”

“... distinct from their contemporaries, in their liking for this form. Adam Bede uses it as much as David Copperfield: that is, more than five times as often as Jane Eyre. Here is a surprising pattern of convergence and divergence in the Victorian novel which could not be registered in the kind of account offered by MacCabe (for whom the Dagley-Mr Brooke ...”

“... continued until the Greek war of independence in the 1820s. In recent years historians, among them David Nirenberg in his survey of anti-Judaism in the Western tradition or Noel Malcolm on the Ottoman influence on early modern European political thought, have shown the way the Western intellectual tradition distorted the perception of particular religions and ...”

“... the emergency has landed the narrator not only in hospital but within the domestic contours of a David Sedaris essay. In the new novel, one of the only references to that earlier life is the mention of a syphilis infection contracted in Eastern Europe; the doctors investigate this as one possible cause of the aortic dissection, before ruling it out. Even ...”

“... workers. The only way she can quiet these intrusive thoughts is by singing the first line of David Bowie’s ‘Kooks’ over and over.All Fours, July’s second novel, is about a ‘semi-famous’ interdisciplinary artist whose work is filled with ‘unlikely couplings, unauthorised sex, surrealism and a shit ton of lesbianism’. It would be easy to ...”

“... rhyme in certain contexts. There is no single strategy at play. In French poetry of the period, as David Scott Wilson-Okamura has pointed out, feminine rhyme ‘gets used for everything and, in consequence, means nothing’. The same may be true of Scott-Baumann’s chosen authors. Feminine rhyme is used pointedly, stays sweet or is avoided. Can a collective ...”

“... gifted him with plenty money when he came out. In many ways it was a balanced life. Jokes like ‘David son of Joshua Son of Isaac son of Abraham O’Neil is in town and kiking everybody with big promises’ (to Ezra in 24) don’t have anything to do with it. I wrote terrific letters to bigots like Cardinal Spellman and Joe McCarthy and only regret I ...”

“... how from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetypal role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hundred generations’. This aim, he warns us, cannot be achieved without ...”

“... By a considerable coincidence there are now published within a short interval the first biographies of two substantial Victorian literary figures, over a hundred years after the death of either man. The coincidence is made more striking by the similarities between George Henry Lewes and John Forster. They were two of the stars of Victorian literary journalism: much in demand as editors, and absolutely reliable in their capacity to produce essays and reviews of first-rate quality on a huge range of topics at an intimidating speed ...”

“... no disturbing precocity as a schoolboy, no outward brilliance marking him out, as Russell and F.P. Ramsey were marked out in their earlier years. Mr Hodges includes photographs of seaside family holidays, redolent of their period and typical of a social class. He includes letters between Turing and a school friend to whom Turing was passionately ...”

“... Civil War would not have taken place.’ Johnson manages to ignore the work of Edmund Morgan, David Brion Davis and numerous other scholars of the past thirty years who have demonstrated that slavery was an intrinsic element of American life almost from the beginning of the colonial era, and that it imparted a powerful exclusionary dimension to the ...”

“... Isaac Babel was a middle-class Jew from Odessa who rode to war with a Cossack regiment. This extraordinary conjunction occurred during the Russo-Polish war of 1920. It is not news, because the single work that made Babel a famous writer – the short story collection Red Cavalry – is based on his experiences that summer, when he turned 26, at the First Cavalry Army HQ in a Volhynian village ...”

“... 12 pages on writing down variant names and titles for Martin Chuzzlewit, or 16 on trial titles for David Copperfield. It is all the odder since, as Thackeray cattily noted, Dickensian names such as Micawber are as unlike real names as Micawber himself is unlike a real person. No one in the history of British society can have been called Chuzzlewit, let alone ...”

“... AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ‘man-co-ordinated’. From David Landes’s work we know that in exactly the same year in which the Thirteen Colonies declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the ...”