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“... cow produced multicoloured milk, she and her husband were convinced that it had been bewitched by Hugh Parsons, the brickmaker whose wife, Mary, had been fined for accusing Marshfield. In February 1651 George Langton, a carpenter, declined to sell hay to Parsons because he had none to spare. Parsons took this badly and occult revenge was suspected when, some ...”

“... nowhere more than in the comedies and farces of the 1730s, eight of which appear in this volume of Thomas Lockwood’s edition of Fielding’s drama. A third and final volume of plays is in preparation, and will complete the Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding – a heroic project, begun in the 1960s, which has now outlived all but three members of ...”

“... The Corpus Christi Caller-Times knows differently, and so do its readers, one of whom, Hugh Smith, sent it this letter of support: The National Press Corps is sitting around with egg on its face, trying to blame anyone they can think of for not ‘giving’ them the news. Someone needs to tell them to get off their collective rear ends and go to ...”

“... readers learnt for the first time through him the reality of North American life,’ according to Hugh Thomas in his history of Cuba. ‘Martí despised the cult of wealth in the US; he distrusted the alliances between politicians and bankers ... he found the Presidential elections nauseating ... but always he regarded the US as an astonishing experiment ...”

“... what Orwell meant by designating his background ‘lower upper middle class’. His grandfather, Thomas Blair, was a clergyman, not to be confused with the Rev. Blair of Richard Ingrams’s satiric imagination. (It is odd, incidentally, to read books which so regularly couple together the words ‘Blair’ – Orwell’s real name – and ...”

“... Was Hugh MacDiarmid a great poet? Was he, as John MacQueen asserts in his Foreword to Catherine Kerrigan’s study, one of ‘the three greatest poets to use English in the 20th century’, the other two being Yeats and Eliot? One can understand MacQueen putting the matter that way, but perhaps it is not the most helpful way when the reputations of Eliot and Yeats are shaking down, in the ordinary process of time, following their immense acclaim ...”

“... events and incidental detail. Less ambitious, but more subversive, Christopher Stevenson and Hugh Nissenson seek to dismantle the system from within by producing novels which look like something else altogether: a form of experimentation which often has rather puritanical motives behind it – the assumption being either that existing literary forms have ...”

“... recommend that students – and one assumes they have American students in mind – acquire Thomas S. Morgan’s The Study Guide for Tindall’s ‘America: A Narrative History’, which, among other things, ‘offers general tips on how to read the text and how to study history’, as well as providing ‘for each chapter a list of learning objectives ...”

“... in 1808, may have been equally keen to share it: in Travels in India a Hundred Years Ago (1893) Thomas Twining told of meeting in about 1800 a ‘Captain O’Donald’ who claimed to be one of those present at Munro’s death. Having just broken his thigh in a hunting accident, he began to tell the story while awaiting rescue. Munro’s first name is rarely ...”

“... the period of enthusiasm for Ossian saw the publication of the important Homeric studies of Thomas Blackwell and Robert Wood. In the late 18th century there was a revival of serious education in the ancient universities, and the institution of the Tripos at Cambridge and the Honour Schools at Oxford had the effect of increasing substantially the numbers ...”

“... Welsh songs at the top of his voice, while his friend accompanied him on a penny whistle. Edward Thomas must have remembered his companion’s musical habits a few years later, when naming one of his most effective poems ‘The Penny Whistle’. Arthur Ransome in turn may well have recalled that poem, which evokes a charcoal-burners’ camp at night, when in ...”

“... the Scottish borders called Christopher Murray Grieve walked to Ecclefechan, the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle. It wasn’t a long way, but his trek was a gesture of hero-worship to one of the greatest Scotsmen and largest egos of the previous century. He toured Carlyle’s house and, as some visitors did, tried on the great man’s hat. To his enormous ...”

“... through the mill. Michael Millgate calls his new edition of the biography ‘The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy’. Since he has stripped it of the thin marital disguise of his wife’s name and cleared it of Florence’s editorial emendations carried out after Hardy’s death, he feels able to present it as ...”

“... by centuries of rapt description of the place, and particularly by certain writings of Thomas Hardy, Evelyn Waugh and Max Beerbohm, we know exactly what Oxford will be: unearthly bliss in the moment, and the object of sweet, aching nostalgia ever after.’ The novel appears to be about to deflate this notion of Oxford, treating it ...”

“... that Vidal had information on this subject: both Stephen Spender and John Lehmann had been told by Hugh Walpole – in identical words, apparently – of an occasion mentioned by Edel. Walpole, then young, beautiful, and awed by the Master, had offered himself to James. After a moment of hesitation, James shuddered and said: ‘This cannot be.’ Edel’s ...”