“... the manuscript was copied in a dialect of Middle English specific to the South-East Cheshire and North-East Staffordshire border. (The poet’s dialect is thought to be from a little further south.) This North-West Midlands version of Middle English is a different lexical cocktail to Chaucer’s London English. Chaucer’s ...”

“... and excitement of research than Julia Blackburn’s account of her attempt to find out about John Craske. Detail from Craske’s ‘The Evacuation of Dunkirk’ She first hears about him from her friend Emily, who told her: ‘He was a fisherman who became a painter and embroiderer … I think he’s much better than Alfred Wallis down in ...”

“... to be the remains of James Hanratty had been packed into a coffin at Bedford prison and brought to North London. Capital punishment had been abolished the previous year. The Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, had decreed that convicted murderers, whose bodies had by ancient barbarian law been consigned to quicklime in the prison yard, could be buried in consecrated ...”

“... on reality – must be like Wordsworth’s experience of two consciousnesses, or like the turn, as John Sturrock describes it in The Language of Autobiography, that occurs when the autobiographer sees their written self suddenly cohere. The place condenses into the image; nothing more can be seen now. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s ‘Montague Street in ...”

“... of the whole Peninsula which American military forces aimed to achieve when they ventured north of the 38th Parallel. Moreover, we entered the Korean and Vietnam Wars without the kind of public debate that prepared Congressional and mass opinion for national sacrifice and made World Wars One and Two popular crusades. In this respect, however, Korea ...”

“... social democracy and what Americans call liberalism has been the dominant political creed of the North Atlantic world. Its achievements have been enormous. As Ralf Dahrendorf points out in his important and persuasive pamphlet, ‘After Social Democracy’,* ‘it has turned the empty promise of freedom of contract into effective citizenship rights; the ...”

“... familiar, signalled the historic emergence of a new social type: the creole (créole, criollo) of North, Central and South America, the Caribbean, South and East Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places. It is these creoles, ‘colonials’ as opposed to the ‘colonised’, who form the subjects of Canny and Pagden’s intelligent new ...”

“... and that, for the past two centuries, these have been systematically played down by European and North American historians. ‘Afrocentrism’ has also become attached to a much older intellectual tradition among American blacks – and originally among white abolitionists, too – dating back to the early 19th century. This saw the culture of Ancient Egypt ...”

“... or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem’ was a recipe for failure. In July 1964, however, he was asked by John McNaughton, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, to join him in the Pentagon as his special assistant. The Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had given McNaughton responsibility for co-ordinating strategy towards ...”

“... barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing ...”

“... verse (from Anon on the structure of the cosmos – ‘as appel the eorthe is round’ – to John Updike on cosmic gall), is therefore fighting a lost battle. The editors make out a brave case for the similarity of poet and scientist (‘the starting-point for both of their activities is the imagination’), dispute old distinctions between ...”

“... happy; it is a great experience, psychologically so interesting as to fill one’s thoughts.’ In North Africa during the Second World War his plane crashed on take-off at Algiers and burst into flames. Macmillan scrambled through the emergency exit, then went back into the burning plane to rescue a French flag lieutenant – a fact he doesn’t mention in ...”

“... Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it out, substituting: ‘a resnabell prity one’.In her will Wolfreston bequeathed her books to her son Stanford, on the condition that ‘he shall carefully keepe them together,’ which he seems to have ...”

“... By the 1820s, a fifth or more of the world’s population, in Asia, Australasia, Africa, mainland North America, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean world, were in a position to describe themselves as ‘British subjects’, along with the miscellaneous inhabitants of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and myriad small islands off their coasts. The late ...”

“... sex or ability, they came and went when they chose, working-class mothers were admirably assisted. John Pounds, a crippled Portsmouth cobbler, ran one such, carrying on his trade while his pupils did the work he set them. A visitor suggested that he needed some new books – ‘those under that birdcage seem to be coming to pieces.’ Pounds: ‘So much the ...”