“... but otherwise the new sect was primarily found in the Greek East. Further, no other ancient writer prior to the fifth century, including Church Fathers deeply interested in martyrdom, refers to this Neronian torture of Christians. So Tacitus may have got his information wrong, or the two sentences that refer to the ‘Chrestians’ may have been inserted by a ...”

“... It looks as if we’ve stumbled on the forward assembly area for one of the British brigades prior to invasion. On the way back we pass a line of coaches disgorging hundreds of British and US Marines. We stop and get out to talk to them. I don’t open my notebook but Paul takes pictures. They are wary and reserved, the Marines, standing tough and ...”

“... The most interesting book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South ...”

“... these books might have travelled far less well. The most recent addition to the series, Heather James’s Shakespeare’s Troy, is reasonably typical of the rest, so far as I have seen them. Her main argument concerns the theme of the translation of empire (translatio imperii) and its accompanying translatio studii. This idea, which flourished in medieval ...”

“... When, in the summer of 1898, at the age of 56, William James went to Berkeley, California to deliver a series of lectures on pragmatism, he could have used his own life to illustrate the immensely difficult but successful application of one of its tenets: that truth is best seen as ‘what it is better for us to believe’, not as ‘as an accurate representation of reality’, and that what is better for us to believe is what can be ascertained only in and through our actions, not by consultation with fixed ideas or traditions or, notably in his case, by family example ...”

“... subject’. The case concerned whether a Scottish child could inherit property in London. King James VI of Scotland had acceded to the English throne five years earlier, and this was the first test to establish whether a Scottish subject, in this case the young Robert Calvin, had the same rights in England as James’s ...”

“... extraction named Melanie Klein. It was largely thanks to the efforts of Alix and her husband James in bringing Klein to the attention of the British Psycho-Analytical Society that she moved to London in 1926 after the death of Abraham. He had been Klein’s mentor and analyst, and without him she had little defence against the hostility that was ...”

“... Her father observes the woman he adores in a pensive attitude, fancies this the effect of a prior passion, and is ready to despair until told she was thinking of ‘the impression made on her heart’ by certain letters he himself had written to her brother. The passion is prior, after all, but she transfers it from ...”

“... most apocalyptic generalisations about totalitarianism make sense only if one shares her own prior commitment to ‘thinking without a banister’, a piece of intellectual derring-do she had learnt from Heidegger, above all. It would certainly be more plausible to claim that Heidegger (rather than Hitler or Stalin) had exploded our categories of moral ...”

“... time, light from some of those first stars will encounter a device capable of recording it. The James Webb Space Telescope, a $10 billion observatory and plausibly the most complex uncrewed spacecraft ever, was launched on Christmas Day and has now completed the most nerve-wracking and complex stages of its preparation. Because of the expansion of the ...”

“... historians of Anglo-Saxon England – witness a Phaedon book, The Anglo-Saxons, edited by James Campbell (1982) – but the history of the period figures little in most school curricula. So far as the general public is concerned, it is only the archaeologists who have succeeded in striking a spark of interest. It would be hard, after all, to walk past ...”

“... and Wise prefer not to use the term) as Jewish Christians. Their leader was in all likelihood James the Just, sometimes referred to as the brother of Jesus. Their arch-enemy was Paul – probably the Preacher of Lies of the Scrolls – who led the believers in Jesus beyond the pale of Jewish law and Jewish national identity. ‘Both movements used the ...”

“... in recorded British history that is not being scrutinised somewhere across the Atlantic with the prior determination of finding evidence of latent imperialism and racial prejudice and/or anxiety. The perception, justified or no, that American attempts to bridge domestic and imperial British histories have sometimes fostered undiscriminating and hopelessly ...”

“... railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems the War turned into momentously general truths, as in an echo of Empson: It’s not diseases, but the void that kills, The space, the ...”

“... be a broad category indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James Fitzjames Stephen. They shared a distrust of reform and democracy, a love of England, and a penchant for getting into controversy in print. Otherwise, they strike one as chalk and cheese, or ‘dog and fish’, as Newman put it, à propos of their one ...”