“... ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or months of courtship, gift-giving and negotiation. John Hayne of Exeter pursued Susan Henley with godly vigour in 1634: his presents included Arthur Hildersham’s Lectures upon the Fourth of John, a Bible and two books of sermons, as well as ribbons, gloves and green silk ...”

“... left hand. Parkland stretches behind him. He has written on the picture: ‘the one and only ... I took this fifteen years ago.’ In the winter of 1938-39 Alfred visited the South of France with his sister Amelia and her husband Albert Emery, my maternal grandparents. Amelia wrote in her diary in January 1939 that they were ‘nicely settled in a charming ...”

“... after the Whitemoor escape, the Home Secretary asked a former Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir John Woodcock, ‘to enquire into the circumstances of the escape and to recommend any action that should be taken to avoid any recurrence’. Within a month of the Report’s publication, matters in the Prison Service were very much worse. Frederick West, the ...”

“... Karin Roffman​ ’s superb biography of John Ashbery’s early life concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet ...”

“... and Portugal, and the new kabbalistic ideas coming from the school of Isaac Luria in Palestine. John Freely’s lively book is basically a retelling of Scholem’s story enriched by the author’s knowledge of the Ottoman background. His one significant addition to Scholem is his suggestion as to where Sabbatai might be buried. Freely has omitted all of ...”

“... from a script. Perhaps it was wise to eliminate me. No doubt I should not have been able to resist John Bright’s definition of British foreign policy as ‘a gigantic system of out-relief for the British aristocracy’. 1882 is even less fertile. All I can discover is that in 1882 Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist, administered the oath to himself in the House ...”

“... to the Manchester United superstore, was to accompany her on a tour of the Deansgate branch of the John Rylands University Library. Mrs Rylands, the extraordinary founder of the collection, was particularly keen on Bibles, and among the many Biblical treasures is a tiny triangular fragment of the text of St John’s ...”

“... It is easy to see this happening in RLT. In a recent anthology of feminist criticism, two critics took opposing positions on the relevance of the author’s intention to interpretation of a text. One argued that reliance on the author’s intent was inherently a male position, since this was an appeal to patriarchal authority, while another ...”

“... who could show they had recently published a paper in a scientific journal. The restaurant took the journal’s ‘impact factor’ – a statistic based on the average number of citations received by papers carried in the journal in the two years after publication – and converted it into a cash equivalent, to be deducted from the bill.The impact ...”

“... to her release from prison, where she was serving a mandatory life sentence. The Anderson ruling took away from the Home Secretary the power to make the ultimate decision as to how long a mandatory life prisoner should serve; instead, it became one for the courts and the parole board. It was this judgment, based on the provisions of the Human Rights Act ...”

“... reference, not that exclusive to the imagination of the writer, or his surrogates in the text. It took time for this extreme subjectivism to sink in among Robbe-Grillet’s readers, who, to the contrary, often found him too much of a chosiste, or a writer overinclined to dwell for reasons that weren’t apparent on physical objects undeserving of this ...”

“... that day in the street to say they would never let any woman ruin a horse of theirs, ‘my mother took still another step backward and said: “Indeed! Indeed!” My father said nothing more except once to repeat her “Indeed!” ’ When mother and son scorched along the dirt roads outside the town, as they had done on that day, she sometimes recited a ...”

“... Central Committee. Because the letter emphasised the seniority of his position in the PCI Gramsci took it very badly. At best it was, he thought, an idiotic and irresponsible mistake; at worst a deliberate plot to keep him in prison for as long as possible. The latter hypothesis is almost certainly absurd. Recent evidence points to the constant efforts of the ...”

“... world and its ‘global concepts’ were mistily obscured, the inside world, as in a sunshower, took on a corresponding, and slightly unreal, brightness. To this super-typicality, the voice in Reid’s first book brings the cajoling, heightening tones of a ringmaster. ‘Canapés and circuses, of course!’ one poem announces, as if by way of explaining its ...”

“... in the book, this couldn’t have actually happened, at least not at the moment of writing: it took place in hospital ten years later, at the author’s painful and premature deathbed. It also takes place by the Kremlin, which the drunken hero, tottering on his way from one Moscow railway station to another, has never troubled himself to visit. Worse ...”