“... a career in teaching. After Edmonton County Grammar School he went on to read history at Queen Mary College, London. This was success beyond anything his parents could have aspired to, a benefit of the 1944 Education Act of which Strong is duly appreciative, but the reality was a tedious commute between uncongenial Winchmore Hill and the ‘architecturally ...”

“... blatant adultery and sanctimonious piety, and loved by no one except, maybe, his docile wife, Mary. But he was a skilful practitioner of the political arts, and over a period of twenty years he had won himself a battery of quasi-monarchical powers throughout the Dutch provinces. He thanked God for sending the wind that sped him and 15,000 Dutch soldiers ...”

“... Clyde in the early 20th century was in large part its creation. In When the Clyde Ran Red, Maggie Craig quotes an article published in the Times just after the 1922 election which suspiciously lists some of the things organised by the ILP: ‘Socialist study circles, socialist economics classes, socialist music festivals, socialist athletics ...”

“... poetry. The War of Paulin’s Ear shows no signs of dying down. He is locked in public combat with Craig Raine, who commissioned this anthology of political verse. Well, this quarrel will doubtless do no harm to the book’s sales. But what is all the fuss about? On a restrictive definition, the anthologist of political verse has the same kind of aims as the ...”

“... It is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig Brown’s enterprise not only a marvellous freak of literature but a matchless summoner of our yesterdays. It is a collage, montage or bricolage of glittery bits culled from two hundred biographies, authorised and unauthorised, written by cashiered gossip ...”

“... This stretching of everyday meaning for comic effect is a feature of Dickens’s work, as Craig Raine pointed out in a 1973 essay, and it seems likely that he learned the trick from Lamb, whom he admired. ‘In expressing slowness of apprehension, this actor surpassed all others … A glimmer of understanding would appear in a corner of his eye, and ...”

“... The Constant Nymph, The Inimitable Jeeves and even (if it was to be a year for the booksellers) Mary Webb’s Precious Bane.Still, the mistake, then as now, is to look at the books themselves. When literary editors pen those overnight pieces on the Booker short-list and lament the omissions – where was McEwan? Where was Boyd? Where was Amis? And the other ...”

“... A wonderfully eclectic range of sources is surveyed, notably obscure newspapers; he has followed Mary-Lou Legg’s pioneering work, Newspapers and Nationalism, in tracing how immediately the insights of Benedict Anderson can be mapped onto the growth and form of Irish nationalist consciousness in imagining a community. But his overall preoccupation is with ...”

“... altarpieces in dealing with basic human issues of sexuality and, in particular, marriage,’ Craig Harlison reminds us and then urges us to ponder how the appeal of artists might be distinguished ‘along gender lines’, throwing out the thought that ‘it is perhaps not accidental that Rogier van der Weyden was favoured in commissions given to women or ...”

“... It became clear, for instance, that the Orthodox cult of the saints and devotion to the Virgin Mary resembled Catholic tradition far more than Protestant. Weightier theological disagreements emerged. The correspondents differed on the question of which was the best source for establishing Christian truth: scripture (the Lutheran position) or tradition (the ...”

“... to suck the reader under. Whom did Fitzgerald have in mind when he included the name ‘Mary’ in the fifth entry of the list in the back of his copy of Man’s Hope? Was it Mary Hay the actress? Mary Blair who married Wilson? Mary Armstrong ...”

“... will be sidetracked by the pamphlet wars surrounding the bigamist and self-styled German princess Mary Carleton. When second-hand copies of the Longman start to appear in college bookstores, the pages devoted to Wordsworth will probably prove grubbier than those occupied by Joanna Baillie, but the concatenation of pages makes it possible to read one in ...”

“... Emory University began a ‘process of discovery and dialogue’ about its history. William and Mary, the second-oldest college in the US, began a similar project in 2009, and in 2013 the University of Virginia appointed a Commission on Slavery and the University; it also became host to the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, which soon included more ...”

“... seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star in the film with Nicholas Hytner ...”

“... 1993 Prize, an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each ...”