“... 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 ...”

“... with much else, notably a roaring debate about the existence of God between Seltzer and a flinty Christian in Harvard Memorial Church. Goldstein trained as a philosopher (she has taught at Columbia, Rutgers, Harvard, Brandeis and Trinity College Hartford). Her books hug the East Coast strip bounded by Princeton in the south (where she earned her PhD under ...”

“... productions written for the occasion in a distinctly Pickwickian manner. Its members included William Godwin junior, son of the political philosopher by his second wife, whose account of the origins of Shakespeare’s genius, a poem called ‘Olympian Mulberry Leaves; or, The Offerings of the Gods to Shakespear’, is every bit as Gothic as anything ...”

“... they were both in Provence that his wife was sure they were having an affair, introduced her to William Carlos Williams; Williams told her that her second collection, Here and Now (1957), ‘reveals a mind with which I am in love’. (The equation also cut the other way: Levertov often found it difficult to disentangle writerly admiration and sexual ...”

“... in the academy (the Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between ...”

“... Ted would take her down to the river and start Yorkshiring on about the trees. One comes away from William Shawcross’s biography of Bowes-Lyon (which refers to letters in which she and Hughes gave each other pet names) with the distinct impression that they had a hidden affair, never entirely acknowledged and certainly never consummated, but definitely ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the end of the 15th century a new spirit of intransigence had set in. Spain was now a militantly Christian country, and Moors and Jews had been forced to flee or to convert. The consequences of this were enormous. Not only are some of the greatest figures of the 16th century (most probably including Cervantes himself) conversos, but the atmosphere of ...”

“... friend over a long period. Like Cotton, Jonson was a pupil at Westminster of the great historian William Camden, with whom Cotton formed perhaps the most important friendship of his life. Any age can mock the values of another. Cotton’s antiquarianism is at times a tempting target. Member of Parliament for the archetypal rotten borough of Old ...”

“... by three botanists, each supposedly stumbling on it independently. In 1906, William Bateson, the most forceful champion of Mendel’s work in Britain, dubbed the new science ‘genetics’. Those 34 years of obscurity have fascinated historians of science. Why was such a major advance overlooked for so long? That Mendel published in ...”

“... with endless credit-titles to match: ‘Designed by Irwin Glusker with Kristen Reilly and Christian van Rosenvinge. Manufacture directed by Arthur Hamparian and Stuart Benick. Production editing by Rosalyn T. Badalamenti’ etc. The resemblance to Close Encounters of a Geological Kind is reinforced by the reader’s discovery that the special effects ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... enemy of Islam. John Cooley is a veteran Middle East hand who has covered the region for the Christian Science Monitor and, more recently, for ABC television. His thesis is that the US – together with some of its closest allies, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan – has inadvertently helped to create the networks of violent Islamic groups now ...”

“... embarrassment. (Forget about the blood pressure.) In May 1382 the new archbishop of Canterbury, William Courtenay, an old adversary, convened a council at Blackfriars, famous for concluding its deliberations in the middle of a small earthquake, which condemned Wyclif’s more obvious heresies, a weapon aimed more at his Oxford followers than at Wyclif ...”