“... sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless’. Matthew Arnold and William Morris thought their own engagement with Arthurian and Norse literature far superior to this tedious Teutonic competitor.But rivalry and resistance can also be modes of reception, and the most astute Wagnerians were those who grappled agonistically with ...”

“... these munitions going off. It therefore tried to shift the blame onto the Lusitania’s captain, William Turner, and also played up talk of a second torpedo. Both Ramsay and Preston are emphatic, however, that the U-20 fired only once, and they broadly agree on what could have caused a single torpedo to sink a 30,000-ton liner in 18 minutes. In 1903, Cunard ...”

“... his subjects were to believe, on the most central and currently contested doctrines making up the Christian religion. So far so good. No one will quarrel with that. But most historians have viewed successive versions of official Henrician doctrine as a mishmash and muddle, committee work, a constantly moving target, from the Ten Articles to the ...”

“... drop-in shows in ways I could never have predicted. The rarely seen Vulcano, a film directed by William Dieterle in a Hollywood version of Italian neo-realism, achieved a lively, sell-out crowd, many of whom were around my own age and some of whom lived on the barren volcanic island invaded by the original film crew. Folk memories of the Roman diva Anna ...”

“... told the sordid tale of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist ...”

“... acting, clearly liked ‘this nameless mode of naming the unnameable’. She told Hunt that William Godwin, her father, had brought out a new two-volume edition of the novel on the strength of the interest generated by the dramatisation. Three more stage versions of Frankenstein had opened by early September, including the burlesque Humgumption; or Dr ...”

“... of which British poets should be honoured by inclusion in the book. Such behaviour, as William St Clair amply demonstrates in his magnificent, original and compelling study, was characteristic of the London publishers. His book stretches far wider than its title suggests. He has a mass of new and fascinating things to say about the centuries that ...”

“... works on Hindu law and Charles Wilkins’s pioneering translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. When Sir William Jones, the inspirational instigator of Indo-European studies, arrived in Bengal as a judge, Hastings was one of his strongest supporters. Though it has long been fashionable to denigrate such work as being Orientalist, it’s difficult to find anything in ...”

“... As early as June 1962, a Times critic at a Wigmore Hall concert where music by Cage, Feldman and Christian Wolff was played noted with pleasure that Cardew ‘actually played the piano instead of trying to demolish it’. It took time, though, for the new experimental music to be widely accepted in London. Cardew and Tilbury had played pieces by Feldman and ...”

“... at 122. The old man was famous enough to be presented to the king, who ordered the royal physician William Harvey to perform an autopsy on him when he died in 1635. He was buried at Westminster Abbey and a poem was written about him by a forerunner of William McGonagall: He is a Wonder, worthy Admiration, He’s (in these ...”

“... Romantic philhellenism and the Grecian histories of politically active men of letters such as William Mitford, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, John Stuart Mill and George Grote.Relating the historical writing of 19th-century liberals and utilitarians to their political battles isn’t a new approach, and conceptually these are some of the least original parts of ...”

“... humanist thinking, or as an indictment of social injustice; others have argued over its possible Christian or (less persuasively) communist undertones. What can be said for sure is that it ensnares the reader in skeins of dissimulation, irony, literary brilliance and unanswerable questions. The character of Morus was presumably intended to evoke More ...”

“... more populist contenders like The Scarlet Pimpernel and Mrs Humphry Ward’s The Marriage of William Ashe. In 1910 Howards End might have run into Clayhanger, and (Wells again) The History of Mr Polly; perhaps the Antipodean outsider Henry Handel Richardson would have scooped it with The Getting of Wisdom. In 1924 Forster’s publishers might have ...”

“... at the edge of Europe and of Ireland, because the traces of Neolithic tombbuilders, Celts, early Christian monks and many others since are so visible, and because the islands are one of the last outposts of the Irish language, they have in cultural terms a quality of the ultimate which matches the naked extremism of their geology. There are other ...”

“... are brought into a sort of relation in the classic fashion of economics: a century earlier. Sir William Petty had valued an Englishman at £86/13/3, but then he probably would have applied a discount to Highlanders because of their violence, tartan, bagpipes, chivalry, Gaelic etc. Over the fate of the 800 men, let us not linger: actually, it doesn’t bear ...”