“... warm to Burchfield or his book. ‘Anyone who has spent nearly thirty years, as I did, editing a major dictionary on historical principles is bound to prefer a historical approach to English usage to one that is limitedly descriptive.’ This historical emphasis is coupled with a desire to produce something much closer to a standard, orthodox, reliable work ...”

“... that even a fraction of the tax owed will be recovered. In 2004 the leadership of the two major political parties, Pasok and New Democracy, was taken up by descendants of their founders: respectively, George Papandreou, son of Andreas and grandson of Georgios, and Kostas Karamanlis, nephew and namesake of the first metapolitefsi prime ...”

“... a variety of scholars to discuss the history of the Italian and international working classes. Major figures on the Italian Left, such as Angelo Tasca, a companion of Gramsci in Turin in the early 1920s, and Pietro Secchia, the hard man of the PCI in the 1940s and 1950s, left their papers and even their libraries to the Institute. Having founded this ...”

“... time. (Before setting off to walk in Izaak Walton’s footsteps, he ‘fortifies himself with a major fry-up’; and skewers Walton for lifting ‘other people’s work left, right and centre’). Even if his word-hoard is leaden, the aroma of wonder seeps through his sentences. Buried beneath the anecdote and the arcana is the poignancy of the ...”

“... the last twenty years, this negative consensus has been chipped away at by many historians. Yet major barriers to a genuine reassessment of Mary’s Church remain. The greatest of these is the burning of more than 280 Protestant men, women and teenagers between February 1555 and November 1558. This was the most intense religious persecution anywhere in ...”

“... account he gives. One must assume that ‘economic and social history’ means everything from Sir John Clapham and Max Weber to the theory of mental states, the study of working-class culture, anthropology, demography, political sociology and social psychology, urban history, the study of the family, and the history of science and technology. Would Kenyon’s ...”

“... irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of the modern age. (The literary hackles raised by Carey’s recent memoir, The Unexpected Professor, which puts the petty-bourgeois boot into patrician dons, revealed just what kind of talk remains unacceptable in a ...”

“... gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While ...”

“... the point when it had reached its fashionable peak, but passed its heyday as a hunting ground for major antiquities and old master paintings. It follows that there are no great works of classical art on show. The only important antiquities on the Westmorland are now lost, a pair of priapic marble fauns belonging to the collector Charles Townley. In their ...”

“... The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as ...”

“... But I wish I had pursued more energetically the quest for papers at Belvoir Castle (Lord John Manners and George Smythe), Weston Park (Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield) and Windsor Castle, where there apparently still exists a notable private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward ...”

“... states and onto Russia alone, proclaiming the closeness of the US, and by extension the other major Western powers, to the Yeltsin Presidency and Government. But this policy has come under increasing attack, first from outside the Administration and now from within, in the aftermath of the Clinton-Yeltsin summit which saw Clinton trumpeting his belief in ...”

“... support to most of the claims being made for ‘narrative poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he ...”

“... was an insight that could occur only to someone thoroughly marinated in academic ways of thinking. John Battelle, an internet-world insider and search-engine specialist, gives a fascinating account of it in his indispensable book The Search. Page was fooling around at Stanford, trying to come up with an idea for his PhD thesis. He had always been interested in ...”

“... but at night he’s an amateur astronomer. He’s dismissive of fears that the association with John Wyndham’s 1950s novel won’t do the controversy-strewn world of GM any favours; and he’s done that clever thing of appropriating an opponent’s discourse: the Canadian triffid is an ironic (and more modern) riposte to all the talk about Frankenstein ...”