“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of ‘the narrow gauge of the wheels’. We are regularly and justly impressed by Holmes’s powers of observation and inference. But there is no contest between ourselves and the detective, just as there seems to be none recorded between Holmes’s prototype, Dr Joseph Bell, and his pupils in Edinburgh – or, indeed, between that ...”

“... from one grimy location to another in greater London. Within four years, however, the police powers of the newly-formed London County Council were to make such shows illegal, thus ending, almost unnoticed, a form of popular urban entertainment that had flourished ever since Pepys’s and Evelyn’s time in taverns and rented rooms and at Bartholomew ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whatever the subject. Newbolt would have been gratified by this demonstration of his vatic powers, abruptly producing what Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction called ‘a felt change of consciousness’. My wife had not the faintest idea what the verses were about, what or where the Close was, or what incident of warfare was abruptly conjured up in the ...”

“... selves; at its strongest, however, a capacity for active and flexible survival, in which powers of a certain kind – hope, fidelity, eloquence – are repeatedly distilled from defeat. The test of the strongest sense would then be the welcoming admission of the latest shift: not as the abandonment of ‘Welshness’, in some singular and unitary ...”

“... It wasn’t a huge leap to imagine that the Christian south might be collaborating with Western powers to limit population growth in the north. All attempts by the federal government to dispel the rumours through reports by technical committees failed. Eventually the boycott was ended after dialogue with political and religious leaders in the north; and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... stimulation of which provoked effects similar to those seen after direct injection of adrenaline. Thomas Elliott, a Cambridge physiologist, claimed in 1904 that sympathetic nerves produced adrenaline in tiny quantities over such target tissues as lungs, heart muscle and the walls of arteries. Adrenaline, it seemed, worked both as a hormone carried by the ...”

“... country for the inevitable war. During this time he was again drinking too much, often with Dylan Thomas, and occasionally more grandly with Eliot and John Hayward. He claimed that in these Marchmont years he was enjoying himself very much, but he was not idling. He was quite heavily involved with Mass Observation, and so with Charles Madge and Kathleen ...”