“... seeing it as a specific feature of Elizabethan-Renaissance men and women. Well, Forman may have been a one-off city goat, as his contemporary the Italian miller Menocchio, recorded by Carlo Ginzburg, may have been a one-off village sceptic; but you can’t deny that he provides a heap of evidence about the ...”

“... and London; and what Italy meant to him in the 1920s is very rarely considered. Irish writers may discover their voice in exile, but critical attention concentrates on the vision of Ireland thus achieved, rather than the way it may have been conditioned by their foreign surroundings. One would expect Joyce to be the ...”

“... self-advertisement, the presupposition that, for example, eugenics is bad and modesty good may no longer command broad consensus.) Although the book is centred on Victorian England (after a brief excursion into the 17th century), much of its considerable gravitas derives from Levine’s conviction that the dying-to-know narrative still shapes the ethos ...”

“... against extreme forms of doing has persisted, and these talented Indians have acceded to it. This may be why, with the help of a certain post-Imperial nostalgia, they are so much admired in Britain. The first nine Booker Prize winners included four novels by Indian novelists, or novels about India, or, failing India, other parts of the old Empire. Of the ...”

“... institutions we now take for granted (from not walking on the grass to the two-part Tripos and May Balls) were invented by these grey, smug, ‘hen-pecked’ late 19th-century types, all tucked up in bed by 10 p.m. Nor is it much easier to explain why Period Piece scored the remarkable success that it did – and continues to do. It certainly trades on the ...”

“... Spraggs writes, ‘that it has even been suggested that the astute professional malefactor may well have regarded clerical status as a useful qualification. A cleric could not be executed, though he might be jailed.’ The Folvilles’ plea that they were trying to right wrongs that could not be rectified otherwise was the standard justification of the ...”

“... her text – is the transformation of this primal rage in the work of art. ‘The motivation may be murderous,’ she asserts, ‘but the form must be absolutely strict and pure.’ Nowhere is this paradoxical combination of uncontrolled rage and self-conscious formal absorption better captured than in the 1993 documentary film about Bourgeois directed ...”

“... of such poems is their refusal to be purposeful; they are poem all through, so to speak. This may be one reason reviewers frequently called him ‘a poet’s poet’, that consoling phrase so many versifiers reach for while pondering their annual royalty statements. Certainly Justice never achieved widespread popularity, though he won the Pulitzer Prize ...”

“... about the colony’s harrowing fate. It was still early in the history of Athenian drama, and it may have been the audience’s reaction to Phrynicus’ play that led later tragedians to prefer mythological topics to contemporary ones. Herodotus tells us that the entire theatre fell to weeping and that Phrynicus was fined a thousand drachmae for reminding ...”

“... in manuscript. In addition to line-by-line transcriptions which add to the bulk of the book and may not be much consulted, except by future editors (if one can imagine the need for them), there are some prayers of unsettled authorship, a dramatisation of part of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, admittedly of little interest in itself, and ...”

“... of influential eccentrics such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault? Medical discourse may well, as Gill claims, have eroded tolerance of difference and deformity, and it may belong to the history of ‘attempts to define and police the parameters of acceptable diversity’. The scientific study of teratological ...”

“... man that ever ruled England’, but as Malcolm Vale points out in the preface to his new book, it may have been formative in other ways: for all his military success, Henry would fight only one more battle, and there was much more to this king than prowess in arms. The book, which Vale says is ‘not a biography’, has three broad aims. The first is to move ...”

“... sustained IRA violence has shifted Ulster unionist attitudes on this point. Indeed, it may have hardened unionist opposition still further. ETA had even less support in the Basque country for its secessionist aims. And no amount of Hamas terrorism is going to persuade the Israelis to dismantle their state. Al-Qaida thought it had some reason to ...”

“... on manufacturing jobs, on taking the fight to the terrorists, and on sharing the love at home. He may even be able to claim for a while that by offering something to each side of the partisan divide he is starting to bridge it. But all he will be doing is papering over the gaping cracks. Tax cuts coupled with unfunded government spending will fuel inflation ...”

“... literary world, that their deaths are caviar for the general public (or ambrosia for the gods), may underlie a book such as this, but it sits uneasily beside the blatant kitschification of poetry (to which this book queasily may add). Some of the bizarrerie comes with the territory: the lock of hair and other personal ...”