“... again was short on detail: most of the book, Goldman admits, is ‘an angry attack on a relatively small and privileged elite’. Moral judgment, not programmatic vision, predominates.Compare this with other economic proposals of the time: with the Liberal Industrial Inquiry of 1928 or the brilliant socialist proposal put forward by the ILP in 1926 under the ...”

“... than 70 per cent of the vote were Labour. The only one to win more than forty thousand votes was Stephen Timms (East Ham), who also had the third largest majority. In the early 1950s Labour had huge and useless majorities in the mining seats; now these majorities are in the cities. The problem is its results outside urban areas: Labour made no serious ...”

“... Marryat, were the illegitimate daughters of white men. They never married, allowing them to act as small businesswomen particularly in urban areas. White men were their route to a freedom which brought with it the possibility of enslaving others. The​ families Livesay has tracked tend to be those in which fathers felt some affection and concern, albeit with ...”

“... cream-coloured coursers thought fit to enter Egdon no more.’ The cream-coloured courser is a small and beautiful plover, just over ten inches tall. The colour of its plumage is a complicated mixture of whites, buffs, greys and browns that shade smoothly into each other and perhaps give the impression of cream, or pale sand. Its beak is black, its claws ...”

“... like the human body:… Even now the world’s great age is brokenAnd earth worn out scarce bears small animals,…We wear out oxen, wear out the strength of farmers,Wear down the ploughshare in fields that can scarce feed us,So do they now grudge their fruits and multiply our toil.As Star observes, Lucretius reconfigures Hesiod’s narrative of human ...”

“... embraced in non-Christian examples: illusion is the domain of spirits. Among Christians (as Stephen Greenblatt has observed) these qualities are more problematic. Mimetic art – especially theatre – has troubled many Western thinkers, Christian or otherwise. Christianity is founded on a series of truth claims – the gospel, the saving act, the ...”

“... in the bath with baby Jesus; a man in a Windsor carving playing ‘horsey’ with a small child; and William the Marshal, handed over as a hostage by his father at the age of six and then subject to execution when his father reneged, peacefully playing what I would call ‘bulliers’ with King Stephen, who ...”

“... political and social upheavals of a wholly unparalleled kind. It is on this theme that Stephen Blakemore focuses his attention. Burke and the Fall of Language concentrates on the writer who was more aware than anyone – other than his mortal enemy Rousseau – of the extent to which politics is not just described but actually constituted by the ...”

“... only to divide and reassemble in Capri or San Francisco the next. (The peripatetic paradigm is Sir Stephen Spender, but Macdonald made an effort to run him close.) Third, he was an adopter of causes and had a pronounced tendency to look for the orphaned ones. If a thing was already sayable, he would be that much less interested in defending its right to be ...”

“... draws on, T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (1967). For the contributors to that volume, among them Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée, were all allowed to quote from Eliot’s correspondence. Compare Ackroyd with what Ackroyd was presumably not allowed to publish although it had previously been published (this being what I mean by ...”

“... no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings ... At its ...”

“... Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained that one author’s ‘writing, which is not so much inelegant as simply full of mistakes, terrifies ...”

“... just you try winking across the footlights when playing Mouth in Not I, with only a small area of your face left visible. He went to great lengths to strip the humanity from the speaker in that play, who possesses nothing but the words she disowns (by making out she’s recounting someone else’s experience), and then reconstituted it in the ...”

“... of great interest to navigators. The result was a map that preserved angles and the shapes of small objects everywhere on the map, but greatly distorted scale overall. Hence Antarctica looms large on a Mercator projection, dwarfing Europe and Asia combined, even though in actuality, Europe and Asia together cover nearly four times the area of ...”

“... cohort of young historians of the Soviet Union trained at Columbia in the 1990s who, influenced by Stephen Kotkin, first brought Foucault to Soviet history. Psychologists, specialists in forensic medicine and statisticians – all those in Russia who studied the phenomenon of suicide in the first decade of the 20th century – complained of the lack of state ...”