“... desuetude which is uniquely theirs. Rosen’s procedures for the analysis of a cultural period may be too little thought through, too entertained by free-wheeling analogies and ‘look-at-this’ correspondences, too scanting of the immense and very useful scholarship on the material, but they are often stunningly effective for looking at aspects of the ...”

“... are two difficulties here. One, the less important, is that Grosseteste was of humble origin. It may be no more than a story that he had to beg his bread as a boy, after the death of his widowed mother, but almost all of the early writers who mention him remark on his low birth – which suggests that a lowborn bishop was as unusual as a one-armed ...”

“... intellectuals looking to build the New Jerusalem of the welfare state. Though this may sound like the traditional realist complaint that things have gone to the dogs because misguided and incompetent idealists have been in charge, it isn’t quite. For Barnett subscribes to an idealism of his own: the view that a thorough purge of the public ...”

“... District Archives. Like Fanny Burney, Anne Lister had in mind ‘a private memorial that I may hereafter read, perhaps with a smile, when Time has frozen up the channel of those sentiments which flow so freshly now’. The diary which she was to write is concerned, in inverse order of importance, with everyday matters, provincial ...”

“... Eliza Haywood’s snooze-inducing The British Recluse from 1722 (‘a sad Example of what Miseries may attend a Woman, who has no other Foundation for belief in what her Lover says to her, than the good Opinion her Passion has made her conceive of him’); Sarah Fielding’s deeply unpleasant David Simple (1744), in which characters with names like ...”

“... word’s range of reference can appear to trivialise the tragedy it originally designated. There may even be grounds for suspecting that the multiplication of parallels to the Judcocide is itself a form of covert anti-semitism. In these circumstances, trying to define the Holocaust in terms appropriate to it seems more than defensible. All the same, you ...”

“... to a tribunal headed by the author and judge Lord John Campbell. His decision was delivered on 19 May 1852 and published in its entirety by the triumphant Times. Campbell came down uncompromisingly for free trade. The Regulations, they said, were indefensible, and contrary to the freedom which ought to prevail in commercial transactions. Although the seller ...”

“... Two ten-year-old boys, truanting from school, go to a Liverpool shopping-centre. They stole, or may have stolen, ‘a pen, a packet of batteries, Humbrol enamel paint tins, sausage rolls, party poppers ... a troll ... a packet of iced gems, a balloon, a plum, a pear, a banana’. Think of the young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trying to steal apples; standing ...”

“... moving to Provincetown, in love with interior decoration and planning the future. And then, in May 1989, they both took the test, Wally tested positive and began to die. ‘At nine o’clock on a weekday morning, late in May 1989, the public health care worker who’d come to tell us our test results blasted the world ...”

“... all you find they marry, and make very unsatisfactory and physically inefficient mothers ... You may think you have done no harm to her health by your training; and that may be true enough while she remains single; but have you done it positive good? Have you let it lay up that reserve fund of strength without which ...”

“... everywhere or total erasure. In such a mood your memory itself becomes a double agent, and you may be ready, like the hero of Orson Welles’s Mr Arkadin, to hire a private eye to explore your own past or, like the hero of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas, to welcome the devil as your research assistant. You could also just read one of the ...”

“... although his poems deal with childhood traumas, they are not confessional; ‘the material, we may say, remains psychologically unanalysed while being thoroughly poetically analysed (by image, by placement, by narrative).’ By ‘analysed’, Vendler hardly means analysed into existence, in the Freudian sense; she means analysed into invisibility ...”

“... to the People), a party recently formed by Nikolai Ryzhkov, the former Soviet prime minister, may also get about 5 per cent. The Agrarian Party and Women of Russia tend to vote with the Communists. If the rule which stipulates that a party must receive at least 5 per cent of the vote to have any representation is revoked – it is presently under ...”

“... treatment becomes more rapid, and there are one or two odd repetitions and discontinuities that may be signs of haste. Mysteriously, ‘Welsh hymnody lies outside the scope of this book,’ though American hymnody is examined – and rightly so, if only because so many Victorian hymns which have become popular in Britain are of American ...”

“... of dinosaurs in three little words: ‘big, fierce, extinct’. The first and third concepts may be causally related: it may be that dinosaurs no longer have any expanse in time because they had such a great expanse in space; they may have become extinct because they were ...”