“... ought probably to be signed and punctuated so that visitors don’t saunter away from a Christian Ethiopian mural (out of Africa) to find themselves in front of a Brazilian fish mask (into the Americas) used for warding off sickness during the dry season. The objects on show might then begin to look as good as the displays in the Pavillon des ...”

“... against the main Protestant rival for maritime and commercial empire, the Dutch; and by the 1680s, William Petty was writing about the ‘Dominion of the Sea’ and the utility of a blatantly navalist strategy: ‘such as desire empire & liberty … let them encourage the art of ship-building.’ This notion that maritime empire was fully compatible with ...”

“... as the two Milibands, Balls and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went ...”

“... inhabitants? Baskin Robbins is here. Pizza Hut, I see from the hoardings, is also on its way. Christian Dior is another sign I notice. At the Hotel Rossia, the television and the radio in our room have been switched on to welcome us. Andrei, our interpreter, produces money to cover our expenses, meals and so forth. We sign for 130 roubles each. Andrei ...”

“... English grammars were even, one might think self-defeatingly, written in Latin). William Lily’s Latin grammar, taught by royal decree in every English school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and ...”

“... nation to have vindicated the higher principles of humanity.’ The Leader of the Opposition, William Gladstone, seconding Disraeli’s vote of thanks to the troops who had pulled off this masterly campaign, could only acquiesce. Unfortunately, however, Disraeli meant by the purity of his purpose precisely the opposite of the course the Guardian was ...”

“... imagined progress – from an oral original form in pagan times to its modern meaning as a Christian allegory. The three chapters on Keats, Byron and Coleridge are all important, at times brilliant. The first has a polemical quality, for Keats has long been a favourite poet of the formalists, as Helen Vendler’s accomplished but airless study of the ...”

“... the handlooms of the Bengal weavers, whose delicate silks and muslins were prized all over Europe. William Bentinck, governor of Madras and later governor-general, wrote that ‘the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India.’ Tariffs of 70 per cent and more were imposed on the textiles India produced, and cheap British cottons flooded ...”

“... Gray’s poetry that has something to do with his instinct for Latin. The ‘massive calm’ that William Empson found and resented in the Elegy – and that might well have soothed Wolfe and his comrades – surely derives from this. Empson heard in Gray’s famous lines on the unfulfilled potential of the humble villagers the poet’s melancholy acceptance ...”

“... Collectors’ fantasy Christmas present it may have become, but Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was a series of headaches before it was anything else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before 1603, nor what arguments led to the exclusion not just of all Shakespeare’s poems and the single scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More but of three late collaborative plays, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio ...”

“... at the outset of his Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes in 1659, the upholding of Christian freedom requires ‘that for belief or practice in religion according to this conscientious persuasion, no man ought to be punished or molested by any outward force on earth whatsoever’. Milton always presents himself as no less hostile to the control ...”

“... from the psychological dimension?’Giorgio Agamben, The End of the PoemThere is a moment​ in William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity when he decides to linger in Macbeth’s mind. The future killer is trying to convince himself that murder might be not so bad a crime (for the criminal) if he could just get it over with. This is about as unreal as a ...”

“... outsiders – first Columbus, and then the heroic scientists who opposed Aristotelian and Christian orthodoxy – made progress possible; at the same time, that progress was ‘inevitable’, because the discovery of empirical facts in itself determines their acceptance. But was mainstream, institutional culture really so backward? There are good ...”

“... boy who has done this thing has disgraced himself as an Etonian, as a gentleman, as a Christian, and as a man.’ He went on to foretell the disastrous future which could only fall to the lot of the instigator of so sacrilegious an act. I do not know whether the delinquent was incriminated by the school authorities at the time, but these ...”

“... school-prayer flapdoodle. The second reason is that Gingrich himself is not excited by these ‘Christian Coalition’ hysterias. He criticised Jesse Helms the other day, when that ghastly old pervert proposed a cut-off in funding for Aids research on the grounds that homosexuals deserved what they got. He criticised Charles Murray’s notorious tract The ...”