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“... ever produced. Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he was also far more prominent in national politics over a much longer span than John Milton or the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in the 17th century, J.S. Mill in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell this century. Nominated MP ...”

“... Jay Winter’s introduction to the work in honour of Henry Pelling points to a shift that has been taking place in the writing of labour history – from concentration on militant strivings towards interest in the ordinary existence of working men and women. The first approach was pioneered by a number of Marxist scholars ...”

“... and last dying speeches of executed criminals for the street trade described in the pages of Henry Mayhew. Between these occupants of the darkest literary limbo and the comparatively prosperous and established writers of serial fiction and ‘think pieces’ for middle-class magazines and reviews lay the large underclass of book-writers who are the ...”

“... of one of the most elaborately layered examples of dramatic irony in the Elizabethan canon, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which not only contains two inset theatrical performances, but whose whole action is framed by the presence of an onstage audience. Mullaney is, I think, the first to remark on the seeming wastefulness of this metadramatic ...”

“... The 13th-century jurist Henri de Bracton, who formalised the growing body of case law under Henry III, had stressed that ‘in misdeeds we look to the will and not the outcome,’ and consequently ‘a madman is not liable.’ From this point on, madness was defined by legal concepts such as mens rea (guilty intention) and non compos mentis (unsound ...”

“... Margaret Walker of Coggeshall in Essex lost her husband at Sherborne; he was in the revolutionary Thomas Rainborough’s regiment, and left her ‘a poor distressed widow’. There were hundreds of similar stories.Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed the king’s return to the town had been captured at the castle in 1645, imprisoned in the ...”

“... seen out of pubs.’ ‘There is not a single living man of letters with less moral courage than Thomas Stearns Eliot.’ He was theatrical, with bushy raised eyebrows, a fondness for dramatic pauses and a way of literally dropping his jaw at some critical misjudgment. To us, the presumed faithful, he was courteous and solicitous, but it was rare for anyone ...”

“... appearance in Tippins’s book, starting with William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane, up through Thomas Wolfe, and on to anyone you care to name, sliding to an elegant halt with Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get the impression that Arthur Miller might have written After the Fall there, but it was ...”

“... there is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album produced in the late 1800s for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, a group of inhabitants pack the end of a narrow alley as though swept down it the way rubbish is swept down a gutter. Such ...”

“... of the first Reform Bill was made by the young MP for the rotten Wiltshire borough of Calne, Thomas Babington Macaulay. He denounced the aristocracy’s blind insensitivity to the upper middle classes from which he came. He stressed the contribution that class could and should make to politics. It was precisely the urgent need to keep the barbarians ...”

“... the way some filmgoers use a handicam). Dickens broke into parliamentary reporting by memorising Thomas Gurney’s book, Brachygraphy, or, an Easy and Compendious System of Shorthand. Shorthand enabled upward mobility, but it couldn’t take the place of a classical education: when his fellow journalist R.H. Hutton asserted that ‘in some important ...”

“... than Thurber and much more distinguished. The Duke of Ferrara surely fathered Gilbert Osmond, Henry James’s lethal dilettante in The Portrait of a Lady: a man who at first represents ‘the artistic life’ to the naive heroine, but whose antiquarian talent proves in fact confined, in a penetrating image, to tracing the common coinage of the world ...”

“... nostalgia need not imply a desire simply to flee the bewildering present, to go back home, as Thomas Wolfe put it, ‘to the escapes of Time and Memory’: the historian’s purpose in going home is to recover something left there, some knowledge or power or psychic condition which, brought back to the present, can help us all to feel more at home in this ...”

“... in primitive forgery, or mimic it. It is not clear that even an arch literary forger like Thomas J. Wise actually committed a criminal act for which he could be prosecuted by the DPP. It would be sensible to replace the term ‘literary forgery’ with Anthony Grafton’s neologism, ‘pseudepigrapha’. This blanket description would cover everything ...”

“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”