“... for progressive devolution, it does not break entirely new ground: the concept of ‘reserved powers’ goes back to Gladstone’s Home Rule Bills, and a multi-stage process was built into the 1920 Government of Ireland Act with its provision for a Council of Ireland. The mechanics of the new proposals, however, are more sophisticated, and allow workable ...”

“... to living in a slum, and delivered his lectures in a tattered tailcoat. One of his supporters was Thomas Wakley, the editor of the Lancet, who in 1833 sent a shorthand writer to take down sixty comparative anatomy lectures given by Grant, and proceeded to publish them at the rate of one a week. In the course of two lectures on the osteology of birds, Grant ...”

“... wits about us. The first two epigraphs to the book are plain sentences from the American novelists Thomas McGuane and John O’Hara about how we judge ourselves and others. The third epigraph is a sentence from Hamlet: ‘From the table of my memory/I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth and ...”

“... Margaret Walker of Coggeshall in Essex lost her husband at Sherborne; he was in the revolutionary Thomas Rainborough’s regiment, and left her ‘a poor distressed widow’. There were hundreds of similar stories. Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed the king’s return to the town had been captured at the castle in 1645, imprisoned in ...”

“... a very particular ideology. Science itself has grown, and changed shape, and exerted enormous powers and been subject to immense influences, and generally transformed itself out of recognition: within the BAAS this ideology is still much as it always was. One should note, for example, ‘the Association’s continuing role in supporting the ...”

“... most strongly have enjoyed critical sponsorship: Roy Fisher and J.H. Prynne in Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson through her own theoretical book Poetic Artifice. In spurning both a polemical introduction and the biographical notes, this anthology may define itself against the run of post-war ...”

“... the Supreme Court whose rejection by the Senate resulted instead in the appointment of Clarence Thomas. Although legal literalism can crop up almost anywhere, its sharpest American manifestation, ‘originalism’, is a stalking-horse for a movement which wants to see a number of the Supreme Court’s most controversial modern decisions – those on ...”

“... and totality, which had haunted his earlier speculations. The harmonious totality of social powers which the young Lukács had discovered in the world of classical antiquity was now given a change of tense and shifted to the socialist future. Marxism was the consummation of the great bourgeois humanist heritage. The later Lukács was accordingly in ...”

“... when it was published in 1704. Not all the characters in Colley’s book were captives of foreign powers. Many were poor white underlings, caught up against their will or inclination in the steady expansion of the Empire. Take the case of Sarah Shade, an agricultural servant from Herefordshire who, in 1769, fled to India with her stepfather (who may also have ...”

“... illustrious wisdom of the Great Cham. This case was most damagingly pressed in the 19th century by Thomas Babington Macaulay, who saw Boswell as a wine-bibbing, plate-licking reprobate, the very smallest of men, who somehow wrote a great biography by accident. This view has been corrected somewhat by the serial publication of Boswell’s private papers, which ...”

“... Roy Foster’s review in the New Republic was entitled ‘’Tisn’t’. But however unlikely his powers of recall or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of another post-Independence immigrant ...”

“... it up. Such episodes found their way into a play which satirised Wren and his fellow philosophers, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso. Wren and Hooke gloomily discussed this satire’s Drury Lane success. Modish wit could be toxic for natural philosophy’s reputation. Summerson thought it significant that Wren’s mantle was inherited by the comic playwright ...”

“... hero; Agustín de Iturbide, the Mexican; Emperor Pedro I of Brazil; and, finally, Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, the astonishing Scottish maverick who played a key part in the liberation of Peru and the consolidation of Brazilian independence. It was not fashionable in the later 20th century to see history in terms of its great men. Yet however ...”

“... and the kind of review Cochrane wrote filtered down to Holman’s readers. In 1825 a 19-year-old, Thomas Giordani Wright, recorded his response to reading Holman’s book in his private journal: Still there is something incongruous and approaching the absurd in supposing the scenes described by a journalist so imperfectly fitted to conceive them … the ...”

“... feels the need for a new historicism in order to scrutinise the values, interests and powers served by the proliferation of hermeneutic techniques’. Jerome McGann and Olivia Smith are two good critics, both Americans publishing in England, who fall in with Mitchell’s injunction to ‘historicise’. Each regards a work of the past as both an ...”