“... involve Shakespeare’s writing in the politics of his time. Contemporary critics, Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore at their head, draw bold inferences from it. In widely influential works they describe the performance at the Globe as a ‘famous attempt to use the theatre to subvert authority’; as a move ‘to wrest legitimation from the established ...”

“... intellectual histories have both an inner philologist and an inner philosopher, but the balance of power varies.Burrow’s inner philologist has the upper hand. He is comfortable with imitation as a slippery concept, a ‘moving target’, ‘one of the great migrant concepts in Western literature’, with a ‘very long, and in many respects very ...”

“... elite on the other, it was generally amorphous in outlook but united in dislike of Soviet power. He believed in the official ideology even less than those he frequented, and had done so for longer: an unconditional zapadnik, he was convinced that the future of the country lay in the achievement of the type of orderly and durable freedom responsible ...”

“... The echoing tunnel as an empty highway down which, as he told me, you could cycle from Battersea Power Station to the Tower of London in about seven minutes. There is no longer a pull towards the iron core at the centre of everything but towards the sweet-smelling Eden of filter beds, that great allotment of human faeces, condoms and wet wipes, laid out for ...”

“... with its enemies and to make itself the master of the region. At the moment, it is exulting in its power, as it has not done since the end of the 1967 war, when the Jewish state tripled the territory under its control and was flooded by a wave of messianism. Its principal victims are the people of Gaza and the West Bank, but Israel also appears to be pursuing ...”

“... As his programme developed, he began to wonder how he could fulfil it singlehanded, wishing he had power to hire his own colleagues. He badly needed to write a book about ‘the men of 1914’, the Modernists so critical to his version of history. He explained to Pound that the vortex he created with Gaudier-Brzeska and Lewis had been debased, had become ‘a ...”

“... of “textuality” ’ that literary theory has got itself into and appears to share Jonathan Swift’s contempt for what Said calls ‘the extraordinary Laputan idea that to a certain extent everything can be regarded as a text.’ Some Professor of Applied Linguistics in Gulliver’s Travels had ‘a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words ...”

“... They did not wish to be repatriated to what they saw as an illegitimate and oppressive occupying power. The Soviet Union’s dogged refusal to admit any distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Soviet citizens with regard to repatriation left it with no way of explaining why so many of its citizens refused to return.Tromly’s book is about the de facto ...”

“... really a revelation that the Elsinore depicted in Hamlet is the place of a relentless struggle for power better described in terms of the hunt than of Providence. The idea that Shakespeare’s tragedies depict lamentable but temporary blips in an otherwise divinely sanctioned hierarchical order is one that was fading even before ...”

“... he remarked that ‘noble souls are self-sufficient, while others are frightened and run mad.’ Jonathan Keates, in his insightful biography, frequently refers to this ‘Moscow-courage’ that Stendhal showed at key moments in his life. There were two duels. There was a commendation for courage at the Battle of Castelfranco in 1801. Essentially, Stendhal ...”

“... together the results of incomplete research in order to construct an account whose rhetorical power will, they hope, compensate for gaps in the argument and deficiencies in the evidence.Perhaps that is why few historians tell us how they set about their task. In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that ...”

“... interested in his own place in the firmament’. According to Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, McGuinness tended to defer to Adams. If McGuinness was ever negotiating alone he would say he needed to discuss a proposal with Adams. Adams, in similar circumstances, sometimes kept his own counsel. In June 2004 Adams ‘very ...”

“... of me, because I, too, was jammed between Saint-Martin and Spain. I was horrified by my own power. The Surrealists talked a good deal about madness, but Carrington was unusual in knowing what it felt like. In Andorra, she lost the ability to walk in a straight line. She saw secret messages on advertising billboards, and ‘heard the vibrations of beings ...”

“... and Harriet Monroe?Allingham claimed in the preface to Nightingale Valley that poetry had the power to ‘soothe grief’. Some modern champions of ecopoetry may feel something similar, and the idea of poetry as a soothing, healing form of achieved attunement – Allingham called it a ‘mystic relation with the Universe’ – has a long ...”

“... no blockheaded aristo; he was an educated bon viveur, who had won the friendship and admiration of Jonathan Swift during his spell in Ireland as Lord Lieutenant. Swift said that at Christ Church, Oxford, ‘with a singularity scarce to be justified, he carried away more Greek, Latin and philosophy than properly became a person of his rank’; he was also ...”