“... was played out. Reviewing Nicholas Bethell’s The Palestine Triangle 30 years ago, A.J.P. Taylor said that no Englishman could contemplate the story of the last years of Mandatory Palestine without some sense of shame. And he added, just as truly, that ‘the role of the American administration was despicable throughout.’ One man who knew what he ...”

“... of silver greatly benefited the East India Company. The silver trade through Dover was also, as Mr Taylor and Mr Kepler have shown, of vital importance for the reexport business: this brought a new height of prosperity to the Levant traders and others in the 1630s. The Goa treaty with Portugal in 1635 primarily benefited the East India Company. Not only did it ...”

“... to discuss a year ago are now being discussed by the man who will be our next prime minister.’ Matthew Goodwin, a presenter on GB News, read off a litany of violent crimes committed by asylum seekers and implored the audience to ‘take back your country’, promising to ‘weaponise these issues all day long’. It was time to ‘start putting the ...”

“... out, by communitarians and others on both sides of the Atlantic, notably Amitai Etzioni, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Utilitarianism is not enough. If solidarity is to be a real presence in our lives rather than a hollow slogan, then there must be some shared focus of – I can’t think of a better word than reverence. Speeches by David Blunkett ...”

“... better to do in England, and were happy to be swept along in the charismatic wake of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom they had just shared an enchanted year of poetry and talk in the Quantocks in Somerset, and who was now eager to learn about German science. The principal production of their year together was the collaborative volume, Lyrical ...”

“... of little-known elegies and epitaphs. Thomas James remembers companions lost in the Northern seas, Matthew Stevenson an ‘Old Freeman’: Upon the ground he laid, all weathers, Not as most men, gooselike on feathers. Elizabeth Thomas covers just about all the angles in ‘A Midnight Thought (on the death of Mrs E.H. and Her Little Daughter, Cast away under ...”

“... like Macmillans’ Magazine or the Fortnightly Review, titbits from Herbert Spencer, Comte or Matthew Arnold, snatches of Max Muller on solar myths or Mahaffy on Greece, pages of Carlyle’s French Revolution, 75 maxims of Balthasar Gracian: the notebooks are a giant sampler of the thought of his time (often the more po-faced and tedious utterances of the ...”

“... to wider civil rights, for Catholics, Jews, black slaves and more. In addition, though, and as Matthew Arnold argued in Culture and Anarchy, late Georgian and early Victorian liberalism, far from diluting Protestant complacencies, as some of its leading proponents hoped, actually reinforced them, because Protestantism was so often posited as the natural ...”

“... opium routinely, to sedate themselves and their children. For the more exotic figure of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addiction started while he was at the great university standing on the edge of the sad East Anglian plain. The Trojan horse in Coleridge’s case was his teeth, which ached relentlessly. A certain sympathy must extend to him, since dentistry was ...”

“... by setting up a general store in Boars Hill outside Oxford, the landscape across which Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy had wandered the previous century, and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in ...”

“... the table and the chairs – billows of books, tossing, tumbling, surging open’. His friend Matthew Hill recalled De Quincey turning up for breakfast ‘wet and shivering, having slept under a hayrick in the Hampstead fields’ to avoid arrest. In 1826, he moved to Edinburgh, leaving his wife, Margaret, in Grasmere with the children. Lonely and ...”

“... together and are buried together.’ Nura had her books with her for her exams. Her chemistry, her Matthew Arnold, all of it going with her, as ‘the moon lies fair/Upon the straits’.Many of the Muslim women I spoke to weren’t keen on retribution. Most of them had no interest in apportioning blame or fighting over compensation. ‘It is all in the hands ...”