“... but Nelson Mandela’s, shamelessly plundered from James Meek’s essay in the LRB of 26 May. Thistlewood put it more bluntly: ‘Insurrection then became a public duty.’ He did not possess a particle of Mandela’s grace and generosity, but his argument was essentially the same. As the chief justice prepared to deliver the death ...”

“... as C.S. Lewis and practised by such as Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, seemed interesting to others, who may thus have seemed, willy-nilly, to be crypto-Christians. One point of importance in this, as usual good, but as usual digressive, essay concerns Empson’s refusal to distinguish between the truth of poetry and the truth of science. He rejected the ...”

“... which he knows well instead of skipping round the world and across three millennia. It may be this diachronic range that makes Arabia ‘half empty’ on page 194 but endure ‘overcrowding’ by page 200. And as if to widen still further the range of conquest and imperialism, Kiernan takes women on board as having ‘a good claim to be classed as ...”

“... buckle down to read imaginative books by dead authors. Undergraduates reading English at Cambridge may begin with an essay on Gawain and the Green Knight. At Oxford they tackle In Memoriam. O-Levellers could be confronting Romeo and Juliet and A-Levellers the poems of Herbert. The central question all of them ask of a work is what it means, and answering this ...”

“... debate on evolution would show, anthropocentrism was still the prevailing outlook.’ We may now consider more specific side-effects of these shifts. First, pet-keeping. We are told that this ‘had been fashionable among the well-to-do in the Middle Ages’. About the rest of the population we have no evidence, but as soon as they become ...”

“... officers found it especially hard to catch farm labourers in the Principality in 1914-15. ‘In May 1915 parties of troops distributed 30,000 recruiting leaflets at hiring fairs in Lleyn, for a net gain of 23 men; at another where 200 men were individually canvassed, ten recruits resulted.’ At this stage, people in Cumberland were also resistant. But when ...”

“... but absolutely authentic difference between herself and the rest of the family), and it may be that art can no longer handle that basic material of the individual and the family. It is no longer thought of as ‘serious’ and ‘important’. (And yet was it ever seen as being so? Probably not.) Grossman replaces it with a pattern of arbitrary ...”

“... cannot pin them down: we are always pretty much in the dark about what they signify and where they may lead. But this truth is hard to bear, and we prefer to frame our experience in narratives whose beginning and middle seem to point to a reassuring conclusion. We are inveterate ‘tellers of tales’, in short, and we like to ‘live our lives as if we were ...”

“... to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017. Your relation to him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too ...”

“... seems forced, and readers who didn’t immediately grasp the talismanic force of the sentence may not be persuaded of it even now. Dillon is anxious to transcend the genre of the cento, ‘a work made up largely of quotations, citations and glosses on the works of others’, whose supreme example is The Anatomy of Melancholy. But when an essay follows an ...”

“... feelings. Gray’s later experiments with bardic odes and self-conscious ‘fragments’ may have qualified him to be considered a proto-Romantic in some sketches of poetical history, but Wordsworth was right to think of him at ‘the head’ of an alien poetical culture. Gray loved poetic diction, as well as scholarly quotation, poetic inversions of ...”

“... was reached whereby Bush made it clear that he was going to disarm Saddam by force come what may, and Blair made it clear that, come what may, he would help him. If so, then there is also a strong suspicion that Blair, like Anthony Eden in late 1956, misled Parliament and the public over the nature of the undertaking ...”

“... in the Kingdom of Savoy in 1851 was ensured by the votes of the Turin Jewish community. This may help to explain the rapid emergence of Jews on the Western and Central European public scene. So far as I am aware, they hardly appear in the French Revolution or among its European sympathisers, except, as one might expect, in the bourgeois milieu of the ...”

“... do so, under the pressure of events, after four students were shot dead at Kent State in Ohio on 4 May 1970. She would appear anywhere she was asked, no matter how small; she stuffed envelopes, manned phone banks, moved to grey Detroit when that was what it took to get the 1971 ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings off the ground, in which a procession of veterans ...”

“... Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover’. It may be that Byron was in the nick of time to prevent a girl he had seduced from being dumped in the Aegean. The fineness of the poem does not depend on his exposure to the practice but on his deep sense of involvement with the principle. Fragment or no, ‘The ...”