“... bounced higher from the chalk than it did off the dull clay of the Weald, where scuttling grubbers may well have been a bowler’s standby and a batsman’s nightmare.In a mere double century of pages, Start of Play roots cricket more firmly and knowledgeably within its social, economic and cultural matrix than any other book known to me. It emerges here in ...”

“... staff to manage them, corruption and fraud were probably inevitable. The Commissioners themselves may not have been directly involved in fraudulent practices, yet widespread fraud was and is a reality. A 1989 House of Lords report put it rather well: ‘The huge sums which are being lost due to fraud and irregularity against the Community are losses borne by ...”

“... Chekhov may be divine, but he is responsible for much sinning on earth. The contemporary short story is essentially sub-Chekhovian. It is most obviously indebted to what Shklovsky called Chekhov’s ‘negative endings’: the way his stories expire into ellipses, or seem to end in the middle of a thought – ‘It was starting to rain ...”

“... odious than odium theologicum. Can this possibly matter? MacCulloch admits that the Reformation may now seem like the story of two bald men fighting over a comb. But it mattered in Bremen. In the first phase of the Protestant Reformation, this great north German port, and its cathedral, fell into the hands of the Lutherans. When, thirty years later, the ...”

“... an underground, chimerical story of Valentino’s queerness. As a contrarian category, queerness may be passé, and yet, reading Dark Lover, I feel nostalgia for the notion that gorgeous, sexually ambiguous movie stars provide grist for the gay mill. ‘Outing’, however morally dubious, thrills a reader who twists received stories for the pleasure of ...”

“... has less of a tradition of literary realism than England, though for an English critic to say so may require a degree of diplomacy. It may sound like saying that Ireland is deficient in realism in the same way that a nation might be deficient in hospitality or human rights. This is because realism is one of those terms ...”

“... of the foundations for the Wars of the Roses. These views have not gone unchallenged. In the 1950s May McKisack wrote a sturdy defence of Edward (rightly praised by Mortimer). Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, in a series of books and articles based on extensive work in the record sources, Mark Ormrod argued vigorously that Edward had been a ...”

“... representation, worries about what makes one picture more aesthetically valuable than another may come to seem secondary in comparison. Philosophers have taken two rather different approaches to the problem. The first declares that a picture represents an object by copying its form and colour. The second, which arose in reaction to the first, and has ...”

“... prejudice’ and ‘moral prejudice’. In a case of reasoning prejudice, the jury may reach its verdict in a reasoned way but place too much emphasis on the evidence of a defendant’s propensity to commit crime. By moral prejudice the Law Commission was referring to the jury’s temptation to convict someone not by reason of the evidence put ...”

“... it: ‘Laurens, handsome and utterly charming, did not scruple to exploit the women around him. He may not have been the first to do that. However . . .’ He also complains that Van der Post was not much of a family man, but here the evidence is more equivocal. At the beginning of the war he sent his first wife back to South Africa with their two young ...”

“... maps (all rectangles and broad arrows), and in a wealth of jargon which non-enthusiasts (like me) may struggle with. (I was inoculated against all things military by compulsory service in my school’s ludicrous CCF.) It all reads persuasively, however, even to a non-enthusiast; partly because – as is becoming customary (see the books on Britain’s later ...”

“... kicked out of their homes to make way for one of Edward I’s imposing ring of castles’. It may have happened seven hundred years ago, but it still grates. Today the English come to Wales not with weapons but with bank balances that enable them to buy second homes. And there is still resistance. Between 1979 and the 1990s a group called Meibion Glyndŵr ...”

“... thee [wit] do very oft prove fools,’ Feste says in Twelfth Night. ‘I that am sure I lack thee may pass for a wise man.’ Erasmus and King Lear give us the conceit of the fool’s ability – unique among courtiers – to speak truth to power without fear. ‘Kings do hate the truth,’ Erasmus observes in The Praise of Folly (1511). ‘But my fools ...”

“... poor constituted the majority of Irish speakers. Joyce had an exceptional flair for languages, and may have attended a course in Irish taught by Patrick Pearse, one of the slain heroes of the 1916 insurrection. Like the Parnellites, Joyce regarded nationalism as a modernising project rather than a means of resuscitating the past. He wanted to see Ireland as an ...”

“... hook-and-eye unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart you thought would never grieve or come undone. May; and already it’s autumn: broken gold and crimson in the medieval beechwoods, where our shadows come and go, no darker than the figures in a book of changes, till they’re hexed and singled out for something chill and slender in this world, more ...”