“... feminism has proved of interest to the second wave, and much of her work has been republished. William Maxwell, a friend and correspondent who was for years her editor at the New Yorker, published a selection of her letters in 1982, and Claire Harman, having edited the Collected Poems in 1983, published a good biography in 1989. Wendy Mulford’s lively ...”

“... work whilst men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes. It is a prospect to make William Morris’s mind reel, publishers quail. But who are, or were, the Khazars? ‘An autonomous and powerful tribe, a warlike and nomadic people who appeared from the East at an unknown date, driven by a scorching silence, and who, from the seventh to the ...”

“... conservatism, Carlylism can also be discerned at work beneath the surface of Tony Blair’s Christian Socialism, a line which descends via F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Blair contrives to put an upbeat spin on his ‘muscular Christianity’ (‘tough’ is his favoured term) but the essence of Carlylism is gloom, its energy, as Heffer ...”

“... thousands of miles away, with their different customs and beliefs’. Although he grew up in a Christian household, with regular Bible readings, he was also drawn to Igbo religion, which he found more ‘artistically satisfying’. Much of his work is rooted in this tension between old and new, between the ...”

“... Nick has impeccable scholastic credentials: he is the soul-eating Devil of traditional Western Christian iconography, of Hieronymus Bosch, Giotto and the medieval psalter, just as the punishment of the damned by hanging is anticipated in countless images of Hell, from Giovanni Modena’s famous fresco in the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, to the ...”

“... antiquity have frowned on busybodies who pry into their neighbours’ private lives; medieval Christian theologians condemned necromancers who wanted to discover the secrets of demons; today we fret about state surveillance of citizens and certain kinds of scientific research on human subjects. Curiosity has never been allowed free rein: there has always ...”

“... the batsman’s point of view. Contingency did its satanic worst to get you out, and you did your Christian best to stay in. What, though, if you were some out-of-order soul who chose to look at this vital encounter from the other end of the pitch? One early cricketer who did so was the third Duke of Dorset: ‘What is human life but a game of ...”

“... William Godwin is a man who cries out to be the subject of a life. He has everything: a repressed personality, ripe for psychoanalysis; a role in the high dramas of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, his son-in-law Shelley and the infant grandchildren; a circle of interesting friends, many of them articulate enough to leave written records, and famous enough to have their letters preserved ...”

“... his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula ...”

“... Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle ...”

“... but especially in ‘Kit Inspection’ the robotic nature of the figures is reminiscent of William Roberts, while the formal shaping of the mosquito nets in ‘Reveille’ might have been done by C.R.W. Nevinson. In relation to style, Spencer was apparently untouched by modern influences from Europe. Apart from these panels recording military life ...”

“... it so good, because they amount to a profound analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with the Christian God.’ Empson (like Eliot, like Larkin) fashioned for himself a buffer persona, and equipped it with a repertoire of archaic slang. On one occasion, he intervened in a ‘small controversy’ about the wit of Marvell’s ‘Garden’ to suggest why the ...”

“... spheres explains the approximation to a stable state which McNeill finds shortly before the Christian era. This stability was, however, upset by a new series of plagues and epidemics from the second century AD, leading to a thousand years of instability across Eurasia. Conflict also arose between the command system of empire and an emergent price ...”

“... would redeem society. Carpenter was Ashbee’s man, though the Guild, of course, was inspired by William Morris. This was in spite of the fact that Morris had thrown ‘a deal of cold water’ on the idea: for him, by that time, nothing would do short of revolution. But undoubtedly Ashbee had shown the Lamp of Sacrifice. He could perfectly well have salved ...”

“... operations when she was only two weeks old. By 1914 Humbert had been transferred a step upwards to William Beveridge’s new Labour Exchange Department, the inception of social security in Britain. Rejected (because of his weak lungs) by the Forces, he fought with courage and adroitness in the endless war between government departments, distinguishing himself ...”