“... were not intending to add to it. But they were not to be ignored, in case they became offended and took away what little you had. Something of this is brought out by a cynical text that probably dates from the first millennium BC. It takes the form of a dialogue between a master and his slave. The master feels that his life is pointless, but he comes up with a ...”

“... Ted Hughes has always possessed in his poetry the gift that D.H. Lawrence had whenever he took up his pen: the gift of joining his ego to the visible world so that both not only energise each other but seem aspects of the same display. The first poem in this collection, ‘Rain’, seems to give the essence of what actually happens when rain falls and falls on a bare modern English farming countryside ...”

“... That was the ethic of the British Empire; and when the empire was broken up, the welfare state took pride of place as the great British rectification. The welfare state is the welfare parish magnified, and the welfare parish arrived with Protestantism itself. Maintenance and medical care for the destitute were made a communal responsibility in the 16th ...”

“... to finance a playboy lifestyle. ‘They trained him to make Europe yawn,’ Shaw said, ‘and he took advantage of their teaching to make London and New York laugh and whistle.’ Queen Victoria told Sullivan he should write a grand opera. Dismay intensified when he obeyed and made everyone yawn with Ivanhoe. Then Elgar arrived and Britain recognised what it ...”

“... This is not the first look at Henry V away from the battlefield. Several scholars in the 1980s took a similar approach, notably the contributors to the superb collection of essays on ‘the practice of kingship’ edited by the late Gerald Harriss in 1985, and Ted Powell, in his important book on the king’s administration of justice, published in ...”

“... Whites the Commission declared Red Terror against the bourgeoisie and set about evicting them. We took over the big houses on Novaya and Staraya Basmannaya streets, ulitsa Bakunina and others. We posted Red Guard sentries, some with machine-guns, and gave the denizens three days to clear out. They were allowed to take with them necessary furniture, the rest ...”

“... going to leave out the biggest of them all, the grotesque toxic-asset and derivative spree which took the global financial system to the edge of the abyss. That was the precursor and proximate cause of the difficulties which are affecting the entire Western world at the moment, but the causal mechanisms connecting the initial crisis and our current ...”

“... classed as a ‘heavy worker’. Nor was he the head of the household: that was his father-in-law, John Coomber, who had been a sailor in the royal and merchant navies. Now, at 46, he was employed by the government at Woolwich Arsenal ‘making war medals’, which sounds dismal and more like a postwar employment scheme than a real job. The only two living ...”

“... Susan Carruthers sets out to explore the long and surprisingly complicated story of the ‘Dear John’ break-up letter sent by American women to US troops serving overseas. But her account offers insights into a broader entanglement, involving the militarism that shores up modern nationhood; the emotional and sexual ties that sustain and can destroy men in ...”

“... about names – he has been known to refer to Liam Brady as ‘Ian’, to Paul McGrath as ‘John’, and during the World Cup described Egypt’s best players as ‘the boy with the beard, the dark lad who played in midfield, the sweeper, the goalkeeper, the little dark lad who played in midfield and the very coloured one’. Political pressure from the ...”

“... he calls the ‘a priori’ languages, thought up by such as the 17th-century Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, or by Leibniz, in order to remedy the perceived illogicalities of existing languages, are mimetic in one sense, because the verbal forms they contain are derived from an analysis of the perceived properties of the things or ideas they stand for; but ...”

“... 18th-century critic Maurice Morgann suggested in his ‘Essay on the Dramatic Career of Sir John Falstaff’, Shakespeare’s art is to make us infer far more material about the nature and potential of his characters than is needed for the action of the play. Cordelia is not pinned to her filial devotion and her demise at the hands of Edmund’s ...”

“... The last two years, in which capitalism has suffered one of its periodic shocks, have given John Maynard Keynes a new lease of life. Events have demonstrated the limits of the theory that economies can be relied on to be stable if they are lightly regulated and otherwise left to themselves. There is now much talk of the paradox of thrift, whereby the rational choices of individuals can prove collectively ruinous, and of the need for government to counteract the inherently anarchic tendencies of markets ...”

“... in a pool of water, gingerly hitching up her skirt. Rather than copy the original, Soutine took the unorthodox approach of restaging the scene and painting his own version first-hand. After ‘wearisome research’ in the countryside around Chartres, Soutine found a peasant woman in a field, whom he persuaded to stand in a small pool for days on end ...”

“... and things like that. I like first-person music.’ We didn’t enjoy hearing this in 1970, when John Lennon said it in the course of Jann Wenner’s ‘Rolling Stone’ Interviews. It was bad enough that Lennon had left the beloved Beatles to work with a Japanese-born conceptual artist, living in beds and bags and producing minimalist packages of ...”