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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but beyond adepts of the cult of either, to no more effect. Powell’s work fits Moretti’s rule best. It is consistently the funniest English narrative of the last century; the proportion of comedy in it is far larger, and far more entangled in a specific society with an unusually complex class stratification, and a specific language with an exceptionally ...”

“... greenhouse effect.’ There isn’t consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part because so many possible avenues of research are being explored, and it’s still too early to say which, if any, have a reasonable chance of leading us out of the woods (or rather the desert, or the floodplain). The ...”

“... Gallery for Beyond Caravaggio, now in its last week. It’s a mixed bag, with far and away the best picture The Taking of Christ on loan from Dublin, a superb painting but hung on the same wall as the National Gallery’s Supper at Emmaus. This is nowhere near as good because the central figures don’t compare. In the Dublin picture Christ with his ...”

“... by the prime minister. Our fearless leader is a democrat only as and when it suits him. 20 March. Nicholas Hytner has shown the script of The History Boys to one of his former teachers at Manchester Grammar School, who says that teaching these days is so circumscribed that many traditional tools of the trade are now impermissible. Sarcasm, for instance, is ...”

“... undoubtedly carried a doctrinal as well as a personal connotation, but it may be that it is best understood in a sense personal to Thatcher; that this helps to explain its ideological resilience in face of the intellectual and empirical frailties of its doctrinal claims; and that the fall of Thatcherism was irreducibly personal in its trajectory. The ...”

“... across his book. But his argument shifts the main burden of explanation, as William Lamont and Nicholas Tyacke have shifted it, onto the reign of Charles I and the regime of Archbishop Laud, ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the English Church’. Although that verdict is unlikely to go unchallenged, even those who question it should welcome ...”

“... allusive replies to critics of the first edition of the book – replies which Wallace does his best to elucidate in footnotes, but which are often pretty confusing. Still, the drift is clear: just because we have recognised the silliness of the claim that Christianity was ‘just superstition and priestcraft’ we need not run to the other extreme and say ...”

“... to be suspicious of each other and obsessed by security: but they should also recognise that their best men are less likely to be the bureaucrats than those who are mildly mad or who have flair, like Guy Liddell. Unfortunately SIS also attracts the deranged, whose schemes are as mad as they are. I remember hearing in the German section of War Office ...”

“... themes of the volume figure in articles on the religious roots of Irish political ideologies (by Nicholas Canny and David Miller) and, rather incongruously, on the role of the potato in Irish demography (by K.H. Connell and L.M. Cullen). All four are seminal pieces, which have stimulated lively debates and further research. What gives most coherence to this ...”

“... For that he had recourse to an unidentified draughtsman he called “Arthur”, and more often to Nicholas Hawksmoor, upon whose professional expertise he relied for the realisation of all his major buildings.’ The engineers, Arups, are Rogers’s Hawksmoor, Laurie Abbott and others his ‘Arthur’. Rogers, who was a dyslexic and could hardly read before ...”

“... a saintly, extravagantly learned Byzantinist who was on the fringe of my family circle (the best friend of a cousin by marriage), and Nicholas Riasanovsky, a Russian historian. We were to give out money for graduate research projects. I couldn’t call Alexander ‘Onkel Paul’, as I might otherwise have ...”