“... results that nearly scuppered the First Crusade and did scupper all the rest. Visiting kings, like Richard and Philip II of France, bickered about precedence; the Christian nobility in Palestine fought each other for the increasingly enfeebled crown of Jerusalem; above all, Crusaders fresh from Europe, with all the bigoted ignorance of their modern successors ...”

“... from an essay T.S. Eliot published in 1926, in which he ranked the sermons with ‘the finest English prose of their time, of any time’. Eliot’s essay marked the tercentenary of the death of a contemporary of Shakespeare, who between 1588 and his death had been successively or simultaneously vicar of St Giles Cripplegate; master of Pembroke ...”

“... gestus – constituted a double translation of the poetry, into the portable art of etching via an English version of the original Greek text. The Tate, which owns a set of the prints, says that Hockney found a copy of the poems in Bradford public library in 1960, but it doesn’t say who the translator was. Many contenders have tried to render Cavafy, but the ...”

“... Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or so without bringing any intelligent new insights to the task’. By contrast, O’Toole has written a ‘gripping, carefully composed exploration of Sheridan’s career ...”

“... to class interest, or, more important, racial supremacy. If the thing is a genuine mystery, if, as Richard Lewontin has written, ‘we know nothing more about genetic causes of difference in social status and power today than was known to Galton,’ then the history of biological engineering, and genetics, is merely an aspect of the history of class or race or ...”

“... When Richard, Duke of York, laid claim to the English throne in 1460, he presented himself as a physician, sent to heal the ills of the kingdom. In partnership with his apothecaries, the faithful Commons, he would probe ‘the root and bottom of this long-festered canker’ and separate ‘the clean and pure stuff from the old, corrupt and putrefied dregs ...”

“... the summer warning his countrymen of imminent social catastrophe. ‘It is my firm belief,’ Richard Cobden told the House of Commons in July, ‘that within six months we shall have populous districts in the north in a state of social dissolution.’ Privately, he was even less guarded. ‘The manufacturing classes’, he confided to a newspaper ...”

“... the world that an army marches upon its stomach, and another Frenchman who proved it for the English. As Punch wrote after Alexis Soyer’s self-imposed slavery in the Crimea on behalf of his adopted country: The Cordon Bleu to the War is gone,     In the ranks of death you’ll find him. His snow-white apron is girded on     And his magic stove ...”

“... Belgrave Square, Rathmines – or in the back kitchen of some much more modest establishment. As Richard Ellmann emphasised in his biography, Joyce employed his father till the very end, requiring the particulars of the ‘Star of the Sea’ church when Pappie was at death’s door. In his last remembered words the old man replied to another of his son’s ...”

“... wit, cerebral depth and a marvellous turn of phrase. But reductionism of this sort won’t do, as Richard Bourke shows in his erudite and compelling study of Burke’s political life. Burke’s earliest works, before his engagement to the Rockingham Whigs, were concerned with fundamental questions in political philosophy and aesthetics. The Tory ...”

“... One way to resolve that contradiction is to opt for meaning of a narrow kind and ferry it into English in the hope that nothing perishes in the hold. This is Sargent-Bauer’s policy. ‘I’ve attempted to convey, line by line, my understanding of the sense of the original texts while at the same time retaining their formal character.’ A pedestrian ...”

“... Richard Poirier, now in his middle sixties, seems to me perhaps the most eminent of our living literary critics, at least in the United States. He has a central position in contemporary American letters, as the editor of Raritan, the best of our quarterly reviews, and as the presiding spirit of the Library of America, the definitive publisher of the classic texts of the national literature ...”

“... with special authority could grant absolution. While such authority was granted to a number of English clerics, including Father William Allen, who in 1568 founded the seminary in Douai for the training of English missionary priests, and the Jesuit Robert Parsons, the position taken by the Catholic and Protestant ...”

“... if the writer of the commentary has a style himself. The most learned commentary written in the English language on a Greek or Latin text, the commentary on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon written by the late Eduard Fraenkel, tries to fulfil all these requirements: but readers who are not professional scholars may well find it too exhaustive. The commentaries on ...”

“... inches thick, it is called An Troigh Mairbh, the step of the dead. Island tradition has it that an English officer walked along this stone plank, jeered at by his recently-wedded wife who mocked his hesitation until, as he reached the end, the stone broke and he fell to his death. Across the water, in Connemara, where the Irish name for the stone is An Troigh ...”