“... On 27 April 1950 a man whose passport identified him as Richard Armstrong flew from Amsterdam to Baghdad. He came as a representative of Near East Air Transport, an American charter company seeking to win a contract with Iraq’s prime minister, Tawfiq al-Suwaida, to fly Iraqi Jews to Cyprus. Only six weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had passed the Denaturalisation Act, which allowed Jews to emigrate provided they renounced their citizenship, and gave them a year to decide whether to do so ...”

“... headgear for ladies known as ‘tires’ or ‘attires’ – and the first contact between them may have been in the ambit of theatrical costuming. By 1604, certainly, Shakespeare was lodging with the Mountjoys (Christopher and his French wife, Marie), and in that year assisted in the engagement, or ‘troth-plighting’, of their daughter Mary to one of ...”

“... the naughty children who pulled her hair, Queenie who spoke to bees, the annual pig killing, May Day, the harvest – but published nothing until she was in her thirties, and nothing on her childhood until her early sixties. Lark Rise to Candleford, the collected trilogy, came out in 1945; she died two years later. Even decades after leaving the village ...”

“... to come across the wispy voice of Leonard Woolf, asked in an interview broadcast by the BBC on 23 May 1964 to define his wife’s ‘genius’ or ‘special attributes’. ‘Normally,’ he responded,she was extremely happy and enjoyed all the usual things of life, but every now and then in conversation, for instance, she would do what I call leave the ...”

“... refuted the conclusion of the argument from design, without challenging its premises. Nature may be well designed, much as Darwin’s creationist predecessors thought, but good design doesn’t require a designer. Thus John Maynard Smith once defined biological adaptations as the sorts of trait that natural theologians would have mistaken as evidence for ...”

“... form of trying to make philosophy sound like an extension of science. Most scientists, though they may find the history of science interesting, do not think that it is of much use for their science, which they reasonably see as a progressive activity that has lost its past errors and incorporated its past discoveries into textbooks and current theory. The ...”

“... that his daughter Sara had followed him into hypochondria and drug addiction. As Rosemary Ashton, Richard Holmes and Morton Paley remind us, Coleridge did survive the long years of estrangement, both from Wordsworth and from all he had ceded to Wordsworth; he did begin to return to himself. When the current of critical opinion reversed, he found himself the ...”

“... utterly irrational rage. I shall not repeat here the uncouth popular idiom which says as much ... [Richard] Hofstadter himself acquired the dogma from such ‘Frankfurt School’ followers of avowed arch-conspirator Georg Lukacs and the sometime OSS and CIA agent, sometime Communist, and active conspirator Herbert Marcuse, who used to begin his lectures with ...”

“... at either end of the day, is the one modern photographers of buildings and landscapes wait for. It may be rare, and more common in the South than the North, but you can experience it once in a while at almost any latitude between the Mediterranean and the Arctic Circle. What had at first to be seen through the eyes of Claude was, in effect, waiting to be ...”

“... himself disciplining those members of his flock who were influenced by Tom Paine or by the prophet Richard Brothers (‘God’s nephew’). He published one tract entitled The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel. That might seem to take us closer to Blake but in fact it does not, since if Blake had written such a tract its title would have been ...”

“... that Pound-as-Propertius was criticising. This would have been news to Pound. The poem’s ‘I’ may flit between Pound in 1919 and Propertius in 20 bc, but the point of the ventriloquism was to get the reader in 1919 or 2016 to recognise their own ‘now’: to see how empires – Roman, British, capitalist – corrupt public taste and shrink ...”

“... comes to find it difficult to write about Charles without moderation. Instead of thinking, like Dr Richard Cust, that revision has tended to throw out the baby with the bathwater, he thinks that there are large quantities of Whig bathwater still to be drained. Many of Dr Sharpe’s arguments will be engaged by historians for some time to come. He does not ...”

“... of the absurd – swelled up and burst in the 1900s, and salaams have been performed in front of Richard Olney’s Simple French Food by some of the most precious amateurs in New York and London. (Oddly, when so many food books of little worth are published here – the unspeakable in pursuit of the edible – this frugally illustrated, decently produced ...”

“... God Himself. As Lewis notes, this would be ‘a claim of far-reaching implications’. Indeed, it may have implications for the fundamentalist Muslim Khilafa movement so active in Britain today. Chapter Six of The Arabs in History was prefaced by a quotation from Rimbaud’s Illuminations, though its title, ‘The Revolt of Islam’, echoed that of ...”

“... terrorist attack, I often wonder what these people hope to achieve. In a depressingly timely book, Richard English tries to answer that question for a number of important cases, in order to address the broader question of his title. First, he has to specify what would count as ‘working’, and then he has to look at the historical facts to determine what the ...”