“... many books, which were not commonly known at the Universities … so that when I came to Oxford, Dr Adams, now master of Pembroke College, told me, I was the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there.’ But the money ran out, and he was unable to complete his degree. Long before, he had stopped attending lectures because his toes ...”

“... describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a ...”

“... Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel ...”

“... he took the platform to deliver his address, Bloch seated himself discreetly at the back of the hall. During the subsequent discussion, however, he worked his way forward, to Adorno’s evident consternation; and then, from an appropriate vantage-point, he rose to his feet and delivered an impromptu speech of great brilliance, lasting some fifteen ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... portray the Zionist pioneers waging a war of independence against the British oppressor. Jon and David Kimche provided a good example of the conventional Israeli analysis of British policy in Both Sides of the Hill: Britain and the Palestine War (1960). ‘It was a mixture of ignorance, blundering, indecision and local bias against the Jews, encouraged by ...”

“... families, broken love stories. In all his novels, human relations involve failure and pain and do lasting damage.In 1972, just before his seventieth birthday, after finishing Maigret and Monsieur Charles and without premeditation, Simenon stopped writing fiction. As with the other big decisions in his life, moving house or indeed moving country, he ...”

“... his life. On 3 February, as a prelude to the Brexit trade talks, he gave a speech in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A fine piece of Boris bravura, if you ...”

“... Peninsula in Docklands back to Farringdon. The floor above the platforms will become the ticket hall; above that is the ‘retail floor’, to be filled by Pret A Mangers and tie-on-the-fly boutiques. On its top deck, the finished station will have a garden and a restaurant with a ‘spectacular timber lattice roof’, and to one side, a large pond is ...”

“... some of the king’s closest companions and counsellors, his tent-sharers and the men of his hall. A good lord could not fail to respond ‘with alacrity’ to the news of their loss. In contemporary values, the beheadings were doubly justified, punishing the crime of oath-breaking and avenging very special deaths. Scholarly expectations of Becher’s ...”

“... more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose. That teacher, commemorated but unnamed in the poem ‘Them & [uz]’, was so dismayed by Harrison’s ‘barbarian’ recital of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a Northern working-class accent that he called a halt ...”

“... on the Law School’s Wall – a broad expanse of brickwork on the left-hand side of the entrance hall as you go in, on which Yale law students traditionally affix their candid verdicts on the issues of the day, a kind of scriptorial Speakers’ Corner. Ever since the confirmation of Judge Thomas, the Wall has been dominated by an angry notice pinned there by ...”

“... faiths is forcibly intruding itself on the religious practices of another. In the mosque’s main hall of worship stand the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, sacred to Jews and Muslims. Before 1967 a small rabbinical school, located at the back of the mosque, had been unused for generations: after 1967 the Israelis reopened it, built a library there, and ...”

“... an admiring or even a disgusted interest in the personal life of the painter. Writing about Piero di Cosimo, Vasari does more than comment on the strange works of this artist. He adds that Piero lived more like a brute than a man, subsisted on boiled eggs, cooked 50 at a time while he was boiling his glue, studied a wall on which sick persons had used to ...”

“... study of John Everard; and there is some predictably tough and valuable political analysis from David Underdown and Nicholas Rogers. What emerges from most of these essays, however, is not so much the undoubted ideological confluence of English and American radicals, as the disparities between their respective national experiences in the past and their ...”