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“... the successes of what he called the English Church over irritating Britons and the obstinate Christian Irish. Burrow takes time to describe a return to secular annals and chronicles between the 11th and 14th centuries, before the emergence in Florence, in the 15th and 16th, of what has come to be called ‘humanist history’. It is an entertaining ...”

“... Eastern Seaboard all the way up to Newfoundland, anywhere which was not already occupied by ‘any Christian prince or people’ (no look-in for Native Americans, of course). This arrogation was all the more sweeping because back in England the pattern of land ownership was still very varied. John Darby’s huge estate map of Smallburgh, Norfolk, dated a year ...”

“... might well think, but, for the Manuels, they were all intent on specifying the nature of an ideal Christian society. Even if that be granted – and the dominant ideals of the Renaissance city-planners were surely pagan rather than Christian – the question still remains whether, More apart, they fall into the category of ...”

“... and then rejected by the Japanese government, officially because it was too melancholy and too ‘Christian’, but probably also because it assaults and deconstructs martial patriotism, replacing it (in a gentle, Mahlerian final movement) with a vision of comity and brotherhood. He was the explorer of shifting tonalities, wayward harmonies, creeping ...”

“... of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost critical tradition that ...”

“... Marbot (1803, now at the Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope) were frequent guests; on his solitary rides in the Lakes he often called on De Quincey (then editor of the Westmorland Gazette), and visited ...”

“... timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest feature, beginning with a fireplace and moving on to bay ...”

“... A hundred and fifty years ago William Thackeray observed – after a trawl through London bookstalls – that middle-class litterateurs like himself knew (and cared) less about working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase ‘the Unknown Public ...”

“... hellish cacophony of sounds, ranging from screaming rabbits to Buddhist chants. The FBI director, William Sessions, began to worry that his men were suffering from fatigue. Concluding that no more cult members would be released, Sessions and Janet Reno, the newly-appointed Attorney-General who was in overall charge of the operation, decided to smoke out the ...”

“... of the archipelago to the end of the 20th century.’ His view of Irish history is the one the Christian Brothers taught me – which doesn’t make it all wrong, just difficult to reconcile with Morrill’s revisionism. The clash becomes explicit in a discreetly buried footnote in which Morrill suggests that the Early Modern period saw the emergence of a ...”

“... tongues. How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world. Now we know better – well, perhaps just a little. We know that something like four thousand languages are spoken in the ...”

“... sin? Unless of course she was not entirely innocent. After all, she was not physically forced ... William Empson, Donaldson notes, found St Augustine’s insinuation ‘caddish’, which it probably is. But one can fail to be a gentleman and still make sense, and even get onto the church calendar. Why does Lucretia kill herself? This is in part a question ...”

“... the signs of our needs, with mythologies. The protagonist in Parrot’s Perch collects facts about Christian martyrs with a view to undoing our fascination with pain. But doesn’t the fascination remain in the collection itself, isn’t the gathering ‘stained with a secret complicity’? The characters in Maggie Gee’s Light Years keep going to London Zoo ...”

“... bulk of the scholarly research on both in the post-war period has been in English, as the names of William Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of ...”

“... have contributed to a volume entitled The English World, for all its slap-up production, its William Morris end-papers and no end of gorgeous illustrations. For a start, could you have a more catchpenny title? The word ‘world’ here means everything and nothing, and it is left entirely to the reader to give it definition. I am being unfair, for many ...”