“... married to the all-powerful Lord Treasurer, Burghley; another sister, Anne, was the wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper. Elizabeth was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most influential contemporaries, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Francis Bacon. The Cooke sisters were a byword for intelligence and high education. Their family home at Gidea Hall, near ...”

“... to see that her guests had fun, apart from good food and good beds ... ’ Masters does his best with Gwladys but she remains unreclaimable, existing merely as a detail in the disquieting persona being built up by Knight. Up until the outbreak of the Second World War, Knight was busy acquiring the notable background that gave him a certain éclat in ...”

“... sand in the hour-glass.’ But the lure of political advancement was too great. As the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth I’s second most important adviser, and the nephew of Lord Burghley, her chief counsellor, he had been born to the purple. But he was the youngest of five sons, and was still unprovided for financially when his father died suddenly in ...”

“... come out. They may have been buried beneath my feet, in this tiny anchorhold in the church of St Nicholas in the village of Compton in Surrey. An anchorite or anchoress permanently encloses themselves in a cell to live a life of prayer and contemplation. The word comes from the Greek ἀναχωρεῖν (‘anachorein’) meaning ‘to retire or ...”

“... this year. But Reagan’s speech – in its way as chilling as anything Trump has said – is best remembered now for his description of the leaders of the USSR as ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’ and for his warnings against ‘the aggressive impulses of an evil empire’. He introduced those final thoughts with the story of ‘a young ...”

“... and Bunyan’: namely Dickens, and here the earlier, lighter novels, such as Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, were preferred to the darker, more complex works of the later 1850s and 1860s. Both the reading public and the supply of reading matter expanded dramatically later in the 19th century, partly fuelled by the ...”

“... he never finished a full-scale life. (Characteristically, his 1790 edition simply reprints Nicholas Rowe’s traditional 1709 biography, with extensive exasperated footnotes proving most of it wrong.) He bequeathed both these projects to Boswell’s younger son James, who spent nine years sorting Malone’s notes to produce the massive publication now ...”

“... even dangerously mad. Paranoid megalomania and sense of divine mission ... [Oppenheimer] turned to Nicholas Nabokoff [sic]... and said the Congress was being run ‘without love’. After he had repeated this several times, I remarked that I thought the word ‘love’ should be reserved for the relation between the sexes ... George Kennan was there and gave a ...”

“... there was a split in the revolutionary populist movement. The gradualists, who believed that the best model for an equitable future was the traditional village commune, carried out propaganda work among the peasantry. As time went by, many of them turned their attention to urban workers; some became key figures in early Russian Marxism. And then there were ...”

“... while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up – from 615 before the war to 659 now. America, with over four times Britain’s population, manages with 435 Congressmen. That number never goes up because Congressmen have real power and even a few ...”

“... and time itself, signalled the pride of living in a technological age.The scholastic philosopher Nicholas Oresme, at the end of the 14th century, was the first writer to imagine the universe as a vast mechanical clock, in which ‘all the wheels move as harmoniously as possible.’ But the metaphor could be turned inside out: earthly clocks were made by ...”

“... travelling down scholarly alleyways and shooting light into one forgotten corner after another. Best read in fits and starts, it resists summary but will, I think, inspire readers and students for decades.The editors offer us some paths through the book. In their introduction, Gunn and Saumarez Smith highlight five long-term processes that shaped the city ...”

“... as a poet for the young: ‘For the young can see him as a poet who in his work remained in the best sense always young, who even in one sense became young as he aged.’ Now, two years after his death, Yeats, or some version of him, speaks to Eliot, almost a quarter of a century his junior. The address is direct, intimate and alert to the ideas of shame ...”

“... ones who have been locked away, those who rather enjoy it.’ Twenty-five, thirty years after the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of ...”

“... of another writer where opinions diverge so widely. Readers of his work, the American scholar Nicholas Birns observes, tend to be either addicts or indifferent, to love or to hate it: ‘There is not the dutiful normative respect coupled with limited concrete enthusiasm garnered by so many canonical modern writers.’ The reasons for that, however, have ...”