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“... nation’ – a curiously radical and Republican statement, a prefiguration of Robespierre’s more celebrated Jacobinical cri de coeur of 1794, ‘Je hais le peuple anglais.’ Born in 1706 to a family of recently immigrated Bostonian tallow chandlers, Franklin did not, of course, attend Massachusett’s premier instructional seminary, Harvard ...”

“... in your pocket, when you may as it were conferre and heare them talke togither when you will? Nay more, drinke togither: yea, and that which is a further matter; utter their minds, chuse Husbands, and censure Complections; and all this in a quiet and friendly sort, betweene themselves and the pinte-pot. Samuel​ Rowlands’s Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete ...”

“... as any other old Etonian from Somersetshire. The text of the leaflet is reprinted in Hugh Thomas’s biography of Strachey published twenty years ago. Thomas told us much more about Strachey the man (cricket, tennis, adoring family, etc) than about Strachey the socialist. This is ...”

“... her husband’s previous wife; a young man looking for something he can’t quite name, something more than a meeting with God, something beyond enlightenment; a ‘badu’, a wild man from the deserts to the south, who the others think is mad but turns out instead to be deaf. Two of the seven are there not by choice: a merchant who was abandoned by the rest ...”

“... Thus the characters in the poem behave like 15th-century knights and often the background is more Edinburgh and the grey North Sea than the colourful panoply of the Mediterranean ... ’ Saint Gregory ‘forbiddis ws to translate word efter word,’ said Douglas. Who were these ‘many other translators of his day’? Douglas’s vernacular translation ...”

“... Son. Gypsy and Me absolutely had to be written, ostensibly as a tribute to a remarkable woman, but more importantly as a way of resolving a near-mortal conflict. That conflict consisted of nothing so banal as simple hostility. The author is 12 as his tale begins, and he implies that until this stage the relationship has been agreeably harmonious. He introduces ...”

“... have done with life.’ This is sometimes taken to mean that he regrets the choice he made; but more than that, he’s saying that once you’re dead, it doesn’t make any difference. Not that the living will ever really believe it; we still want Achilles. And so we get the story of his life: ‘But first, a quickening.’ Achilles is the son of Thetis, a ...”

“... let her out), Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The ...”

“... of the United States of America. As the novel opens, he’s really up against it. The time is more or less now – or, to be precise, five days this spring. The action begins on Thursday, 10 May. The president is testifying before a congressional select committee whose members demand to know why he’s been making clandestine phone calls to the world’s ...”

“... deserved) reputation for being hilarious is that audiences strongly expect it to make them laugh. More than that: they know it will make them laugh. The curtain at the Piccadilly Theatre went up to reveal ‘an open-plan living area, with a staircase leading to a gallery. A notable feature is the extensive range of entrances and exits provided … All in ...”

“... never definitively resolved: Lucy’s views veer between trust and suspicion, and the reader’s more or less follow. It’s not, ultimately, very important: Raban isn’t the first person to have observed that all autobiography is to some extent a species of fiction, as much as all fiction is, from one point of view, a variety of autobiography. Even if the ...”

“... feet of his dead twin brother’s corpse. That makes the passage from Homer instantly something more than a translation: ‘Patroclus, dear brother, I shall do as you ask: I’ll see to the arrangements for your funeral. But Come closer now, for a moment let us embrace And wail in excruciating lamentation.’ He reached out but he couldn’t get hold of ...”

“... actor. In a sluggish movie we keep looking at our watch and it seems to have stopped. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is more slow than sluggish but pretty sluggish all the same. Anderson wrote the adaptation himself and clearly loves the 2009 Thomas Pynchon novel he is ...”

“... Nash’s Olden Time as the late Tudor and early Stuart period, though he could have said more about the long literary tradition of ‘Old English hospitality’, which generated the Victorian lithographs. It originated with the nostalgia of Elizabethan Catholics for the dissolved monasteries; it continued with Jacobean laments about the gentry ...”

“... a series of books published nearly thirty years ago by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Macfarlane, Keith Thomas and Erik Midelfort. Until very recently, however, it was the history of trials on the Continent alone that seemed a lively subject, and in 1996 Diane Purkiss could still properly complain of ‘the torpor of English witchcraft studies’. It was as if ...”