“... outside the writer, an observed rather than a felt experience. The moment Harris singles out, in May 1798, when Coleridge ran outdoors into a storm in Devon, hatless and full of febrile sensibility, was born of the desire for immersion in the elemental, the dissolution of self in the infinite, which made weather as great a theme as love for the ...”

“... mentioned. More glaring is the subtraction of party allegiances from local politics. There may be a recession, and ‘austerity measures imposed by the national government’, but there’s no reference to a coalition. Though it’s hard to imagine Howard Mollison being anything but as true-blue as the Roquefort sold in his shop, we don’t learn that ...”

“... or ‘because’ or even ‘if’ these things have been done, such and such an action may follow. Medieval theorists struggled to reconcile the ‘absolute’, or free and ungoverned, character of this distinctive construction with the regimen, or logical hierarchy, that ought to govern all syntax. The distinction matters. To take a famous ...”

“... year of what has often been called the Peasants’ Revolt. The insurgency began in Essex in late May, spread quickly to Kent and on 13 June the rebels gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile ...”

“... sir, were I human’). As for Caliban, the best Prospero can do is to propose that his slave may represent something about himself: ‘This thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine.’ Is he assuming the white man’s burden or admitting that Caliban’s brutality may have something to do with imprisonment, torture and ...”

“... there is information as to the mortality given for a few small centres, which may be trusted, and may serve as an approximate measure of the mortality in general.’ Medieval records are still being profitably mined for evidence of this kind. In Late Medieval Oxford (1992), W.J. Courtenay concluded that ...”

“... in 1956, in the midst of the Suez crisis, with only five followers in the House of Commons, he may have promised it a resurgent role in British politics; yet when he resigned, just over ten years later, it still had only 12 MPs and remained marginal rather than crucial to the making and unmaking of governments. He ...”

“... to get ‘devilish angry’, which, the poem intimates, might do him some good. The setting may be a little different, but this is Beowulf reshot as ‘Grendel Strikes Back’, the harpist and hall forced to listen to a little demon music for a change. From Homer through Virgil and on, the descent to Hades has grown into a convention that has allowed ...”

“... presidents of our countries, and even the wars we join in and the treaties we sign.’ As all this may suggest, Arab fiction is mostly political (and some would add that Arab politics is mostly based on fiction). The Syrian novelist Halim Barakat doesn’t allow for any choice in the matter: ‘Contemporary Arab writers have been preoccupied with themes of ...”

“... the only civilian airport in the world wantonly destroyed since World War Two. Since last May Israeli F-16s (generously supplied by the US) have regularly bombed and strafed Palestinian towns and villages, Guernica style, destroying property and killing civilians and security officials (there is no Palestinian army, navy or air force to protect the ...”

“... shadows walk the raisins and nuts – ultimately excludes even a willing reader, in a way which may not be programmatic, but is still effectively punitive. The frustration induced is different from the experience of reading Prynne, whose effortless perversity in switching the points of reference indicates an intriguing confidence in the game he is ...”

“... advance overlooked for so long? That Mendel published in German in a relatively obscure journal may have had something to do with it. Maybe he was out of sync with the era’s biological agenda: evolution was the hot topic, not the nuts and bolts of how characteristics were transmitted from parents to offspring. Maybe professional biologists disregarded ...”

“... case against Jonathan Franzen and his kind of big social novel did not look so watertight. There may be something too wised-up about these novels, but interest in large-scale fiction has not fallen off after the attacks. Writers quickly settled back into familiar tracks; in the introduction to his new collection of essays, How to Be Alone,* Franzen ...”

“... of multifaceted disagreement among the members of a large and fractious family. Specialists may occasionally even conclude that, in Lynch’s words, they are watching ‘sand-lot philosophy with pick-up teams’. But philosophy’s pros are hardly any closer to agreement on the issues at stake than they were a couple of millennia ago, and those issues ...”

“... in common, is, we now realise, ‘constructed’, ‘a product of culture’. Take nakedness. One may doubt whether early modern English men and women were ever naked. In the mid-17th century Quakers went ‘naked for a sign’, but they often turn out to have been wearing sackcloth coats – ‘naked’ here means without shoes, hats or outer garments. Men ...”