“... which the deep past becomes more significant than the last 24 hours. References to ‘Father’ (William Wedgwood Benn) and to his elder brother Michael (killed in the Second World War) crop up frequently, and merge with moral reminders from Labour Party history. Benn’s father led the Liberal defection from Lloyd George in 1924, and stood up in Ramsay ...”

“... and your sister.’ Stuck in this enforced, accompanied solitude, Wordsworth turned to writing. ‘William works hard,’ Dorothy reported, ‘but not very much in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making ...”

“... to appeal directly to the British sovereign. He mentions, for instance, the gifts sent to William IV and Queen Adelaide by the new king of Oudh in 1834. But he does not record the humiliating fate of those gifts. That story is told vividly by Emily Hannam in Eastern Encounters, the sumptuous volume that accompanied the recent exhibition at the ...”

“... in the Fifties were already interpreting in terms of the opposition between mere flux and the Christian kairos, is also the basis of Kermode’s distinction between the ‘reality’ of chronos (tick-tick) and a ‘time-redeeming’ kairos (tick-tock). And just as Eliot looked to the coexistence of ‘Time past and time future/What might have been and ...”

“... for David Nokes they become a central feature of his ability to create a ‘shock effect’. Thus William Hogarth’s first encounter with Johnson at the home of Samuel Richardson: While he was talking, he perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was ...”

“... of the individual despite its imperfections seemed to him a confirmation of what mattered most in Christian faith, ‘Christianity having recognised, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul’. Originality, rather than conformity, would be the natural expression of this value: ‘every point and niche’ of Gothic architecture ...”

“... intact – or they may be radically transformed. These processes provide the central theme of William Schniedewind’s book, in which he traces every mention of writing in the Bible, and carefully tracks the loyalties divided between the oral and the written Torah through the history of Judaism. He also notes those who support both commitments: deep ...”

“... Kettering’s simple Baptist church contains a dedication to the missionary and emancipator William Knibb, who growing up in England had worshipped at Fuller, the chapel where my father was a minister. The money needed to buy the land for the ‘free village’ of Kettering in the immediate aftermath of the end of slavery in 1833 had come from ...”

“... was of course part of Eliot’s own journey towards a conservative (and at times cod-English) Christian identity. He underwent Anglican baptism the following year, and in 1928 reprinted the essay in a manifesto volume entitled For Lancelot Andrewes. In its preface he nailed his own colours to the mast as being (like his clerical hero) ‘classicist in ...”

“... his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal ...”

“... figure of Chatterjee’s book. In June 1756, Siraj laid siege to the British garrison at Fort William in Calcutta. The governor and many of the soldiers fled by boat. When those who remained surrendered, they were put in a small (or large) room, where, by the next morning, some (or many) had died of exhaustion, dehydration, asphyxiation or through ...”

“... the day’s failures will always outweigh its successes. Ruth was born in Gracefield, Michigan, a Christian commune run by the Brotherhood, a fictional Anabaptist sect with settlements across North America. Like the Amish and Mennonites, its members wear plain garments and keep their faces bare, in a ‘constantly recalibrating state of voluntary ...”

“... agree where Mr Tracey writes about things which I experienced. His disparaging description of Sir William Haley as the curator of outmoded ideas and conventions obscures the fact that it was Haley who introduced the Home, Light and Third Programmes, ending the programmatic paternalism bequeathed by Reith. Shy and aloof from the staff in general though he ...”

“... of Gustave Doré in London, his 1872 series of engravings, and the scenes of proletarian life by William Small and Frank Holl – the kind of work that Van Gogh was struggling to imitate around the time he turned thirty – that stand as formidable if unamiable exemplars of narrative force. I couldn’t achieve any liking for a prissily portentous symbolical ...”

“... absorbed into the general collection, and they weren’t having that, so the coffin was sold to William Randolph Hearst for £72. Ingram by this time was long dead. On a hunting trip in Somaliland with Lady Meux’s husband in 1888, he was, as Kipling relayed to Haggard, gored and trampled to death by an elephant he’d wounded but failed to kill when he ...”