“... Ambrose did it to preserve his voice or because someone might overhear him reading a difficult passage and ask him to explain it. Scholars have, in turn, asked why Augustine found Ambrose’s silent reading noteworthy: was it simply his ability to do it, or the peculiarity of his solitude?What’s clear is that reading was, for most people, a fundamentally ...”

“... than non-French readers. But one should also beware the biases that such a background induces. The passage of time, including twenty years living in a British society not famed for its revolutionary fervour, have dented my youthful enthusiasm. But when I think or read about those events, I still feel emotional and – I make this confession because it reveals ...”

“... academic protocols, a throwback to something like John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu or Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (an influence Howe acknowledges). It’s an unorthodox close reading of ‘My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun’, which encompasses, among other things, the American Civil War, Wuthering Heights, Richard III and Robert ...”

“... the Two Acts in December 1795, and in that sense – as part of an alliance which stretched from Charles James Fox through the genteel supporters of the Society for Constitutional Information to the largely shopkeeper and artisan LCS – he did perform a leading role. With a scrupulous sense of this borderline distinction, Francis Place noted down Frend as ...”

“... to ‘be one of the supremes’, for instance, with its inevitable ring of Tamla Motown. But the passage gives plenty of evidence that he’d be more tickled than distressed by so unintended a suggestion. Because, while the grand ambitions expressed in the passage are very seriously meant, so are the associated sounds of ...”

“... Stilton in Huntingdonshire). Two, we discovered, had ventured further afield. One, Oscar, booked passage for America. He registered his destination as 414 West First Street, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Unfortunately, his third-class ticket was for the Titanic. The other, ‘Hadman E.’, was recorded among the columns of the dead on the King’s Cross war ...”

“... McKenna in 1957 It was strange being alone with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished ...”

“... minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very British one. But it was, as Charles Moore describes, the result of a very Tory conspiracy. Thatcher fell following the first ballot of a leadership election among Conservative MPs in which she secured more votes than her rival Michael Heseltine but not quite enough to prevent the contest ...”

“... from the High-Street may sit at their shop doors, and see the criminals executed.’ In this passage (brought to my attention by Lincoln Faller, who uses it effectively in his forthcoming book on Defoe), the reader is invited to share the pain of travel, including seeing too much, the eyes strained and tired. The seeing which is seeing too much is then ...”

“... most of these men were Spanish. Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón was fifty when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V mandated his expedition to Chicora, in present-day South Carolina, which slave raiders claimed was a ‘New Andalusia’. Ayllón funded the voyage himself, banking on future dividends. Like other colonisers he hoped to establish a silk industry, since ...”

“... Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to say, was working ...”

“... of Selected’ by default. The letters show the opposite to be true. What Graham’s publisher, Charles Monteith of Faber, first suggested in 1978 was a 48-page Selected Poems which would not include any of the early work. Graham wrote back tetchily: ‘My dear Charles, do you not see those early books are coming into ...”

“... of the king and queen. At that point, it was not only the radicals who were still exclaiming with Charles James Fox that the Revolution was the greatest and the best event that ever happened to the world. Pitt himself had declared a few months earlier that ‘the present convulsions of France must, sooner or later, terminate in general harmony … thus ...”

“... Jim Conklin, who was trying to outwalk death. Red Badge is the most quotable of books, but the passage that lingers after all others is the five-page account of Henry Fleming’s hasty march beside the spectral figure he is slow to recognise – ‘Gawd! Jim Conklin!’ His grey, appalling face had attracted attention in the crowd … In a dogged way, he ...”

“... the 1590s to get his own Politica removed from the Index, Justus Lipsius agreed to expurgate a passage bemoaning the ill repute into which ‘the Italian reprobate’ had fallen (‘for who is not for flogging the poor man these days?’); he was allowed to keep a remark that dismissed ‘most modern authors’, Machiavelli excepted, as ...”