“... with his specialised study English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (1965), followed by his recent excellent short general book in Oxford’s Past Masters series. For a general assessment that is longer and fuller than McConica’s, but equally soundly based, up-to-date and accessible, there are two new books, both ...”

“... reading seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry ...”

“... come back soaked. ‘Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain’: if anything, I’d say, Thomas understates. The nine men’s morris would be fill’d with mud, if the local farmer had left it. But he’s an improver who roots up hedgerows and demolishes old cottages. Not long ago, he gassed his badgers and bulldozed their set. They used to bring up ...”

“... result (largely written by McGovern’s speechwriter, Robert Schrum, who later went to work for Edward Kennedy) was at least as good as the speech made by President Carter in 1980, even though Carter’s chief speechwriter and other aides spent over two months preparing two series of drafts, an ‘A’ series for Jimmy and Rosalynn and a ‘B’ series for ...”

“... plantation to be shared out between the dead man’s relatives.In 1834, Douglass’s new master, Thomas Auld, a mean ‘object of contempt’, believing his authority was being challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking ...”

“... the practical constraints that law and custom placed on the exercise of royal authority. In 1386 Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, reminded the King of the fate of his great-grandfather, Edward II, and told Richard that he, too, could be deposed if he ruled ‘without the common consent of the people’; in 1388 the King’s ...”

“... like other non-Europeans, occupied the lower rungs, and anthropology’s interest in them was, as Edward Tylor put it, ‘that savages and barbarians are like what our ancestors were and our peasants still are’. How were 19th-century black intellectuals to respond to this? Early on, Howe focuses on the key figure of ...”

“... because it was the Capital of the Gold Rush. She describes her hero, then bearing the name Edward Muggeridge, arriving there in the autumn of 1855, a youth escaping a tedious provincial future in the family coal and grain business in Kingston-on-Thames. He had left England in 1852, but his three-year journey across America from New York has not been ...”

“... He needed his royal supremacy preached up and down the land. And who better to preach it than Thomas Cranmer or Hugh Latimer, full of Continental learning, opposed to Papal pretensions, and keen to see Henry as a godly prince who would destroy idolatry and embrace true religion. Henry had not intended to go so far along that road of reformation, but he ...”

“... on the margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream anthologies, while Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both ...”

“... away and the contents of Mitford’s parcel were emptied out onto the table, the collector – one Thomas James Wise – recognised the momentous find and bought all dozen copies.So the story went, at any rate. But the entire tale – sausages and all – was made up by Wise. In reality the book didn’t exist before 1893, when Wise himself had forged ...”

“... he never ceased to exert himself on behalf of his sister-in-law.Geoffrey’s great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold of Rugby, which meant that Matthew Arnold was a great-uncle. Geoffrey was born in the spring of 1888 at Toxteth, where his father was principal of Liverpool College. His mother, one of the daughters of ...”

“... texts, and the effect is of a kind of memory or haunting: of a book remembering its origins. Thomas Nashe imagined his printed pages being used to wrap expensive slippers (‘velvet pantofles’), ‘so they be not … mangy at the toes, like an ape about the mouth’. As Leah Price showed recently in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, we ...”

“... Not that Declan Kiberd, director of the Yeats Summer School, would admit them. Citing the ideas of Edward Said, he recently argued that ‘ “Irishness” is simply the experience of being endlessly defined and described, derided and defended, by others.’ This is a bit odd coming from a man who annually invites the likes of Said and Terry Eagleton to ...”

“... faintly ludicrous figure, and in her earlier years her status as Miss Emma Gifford or even as Mrs Thomas Hardy might well have been insufficient to ensure that her letters would be kept and treasured.’ It was Emma herself who seems to have destroyed her early letters to her husband. Just two poignant scraps remain, transcribed by Hardy. In 1870, only months ...”