“... Jane is so slipshod I cry. Evil dissolves, & love, like foam; that love. Prattle of children powers me home, my heart claps like the swan’s under a frenzy of who love me & who shine.Homage to Mistress Bradstreet is much admired and little read, its clotted syntax not permitting enough air to let the piece breathe. One feels the strain in its ...”

“... goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son ...”

“... 1794 the runners were working for the Home Office, employed in the surveillance of radicals. When Thomas Hardy, secretary of the London Corresponding Society, was arrested prior to his trial (and eventual acquittal) for high treason, among those who came for him, at six in the morning when he and his wife were asleep, were the two most high-profile runners in ...”

“... he reveals his name, and even this arch literary empiricist curiously insists that his first name, Thomas (rather than his surname), is the real sign that he is a person of no nonsense: ‘You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all ...”

“... analyses ‘The Journal of the House of Lords for the Long Parliament’. There is nothing on Sir Thomas More. Few of the contributors are former pupils. The five most distinguished are neither pupils nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially commissioned article by a professor of philosophy, Louis O. Mink, discusses Hexter’s theories of history ...”

“... for example, in Ulysses between the book’s musclebound organisation and its infinitely supple powers of description. But in Post-Modernism the dialectic collapsed, leaving nothing but empty structures. Butler warns against nostalgia for the great achievements of the Modernists, yet everything in his book confirms the apothegm: Post-Modernism, homo tristis ...”

“... can be turned by the poet into deathless verse. When Charsky first tested the improviser’s powers, he asked him to declaim on the theme of inspiration, and the Italian made a magnificent defence of the poet’s freedom to scorn the crowd and choose any subject he wishes, even the most trivial and vulgar one, ‘as the great eagle sails past tower and ...”

“... of 17th-century political articulacy below the level of political privilege. It was at Putney that Thomas Rainborough spoke for ‘the poorest he that lives in England’, and that he heard, in the pleas of Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton for the rights of property, ‘nothing at all that can convince me, why any man that is born in England ought not to ...”

“... the sheriff and the abbeys who were regarded as corrupt by definition, by their social roles and powers – he now fought only against those who were evil by individual nature. Robin, too, became depoliticised and personalised, opposed only to noblemen who were personally treacherous to him. In Munday, Prince John is Robin’s enemy only because he is a ...”

“... to dress up outing Thiel as his own statement of principle. Gawker’s Silicon Valley editor Owen Thomas (who is himself gay) had written:How many out VCs do you know? I think it explains a lot about Thiel: his disdain for convention, his quest to overturn established rules. Like the immigrant Jews who created Hollywood a century ago, a gay investor has no ...”

“... maybe a little reverb. For Banks, ideas were important and plots were paramount. His imaginative powers were extraordinary but no one would call him a prose stylist. Perhaps all the smart but simple teenage narrators were more than coincidence? Fifth, and frankly, there was little to distinguish between Banks the author and Banks the narrator, which meant ...”

“... got together, even when we were that young. We were competitive, deluded and full of our own small powers. And, of course, we spoke our own language. We even had our own way of walking – which wasn’t unlike that of the two boys on the video – dragging our feet, hands in our pockets, heads always lolling towards the shoulder. That culpable tilt gave the ...”

“... sure, ‘melancholy’ is a much broader term than ‘depression’, connoting strong imaginative powers (with attendant pleasures) as well as anguish of spirit. But, when all this is conceded, it remains clear that the central reference of ‘melancholic’ is to states of profound depression. The real difficulty is one of style. Burton, as everyone ...”

“... one so calculated as yourself to raise our sex ... if you would but know your value and exert your powers you could give the men a most immense drubbing.’ The tone of letters like this flatly contradicts the conventional image of the two half-sisters petulantly and jealously bickering their way through their long relationship. Mary is a constant witness to ...”

“... The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich(1848), James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904-8). Though she has been considerably influenced by recent theorising, both linguistic and otherwise, Armstrong does not so much wish to deconstruct Victorian poetry as to show how it was already struggling with something like ...”