“... was heavily revised in 1844) and the vivid anti-war poem Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835). Robert Morrison’s volume on the piecemeal journalism of 1822-38 gives a very good sense of Hunt the critic, showing his extraordinary eye for new talent (the reviews of the young Carlyle, Browning and Tennyson are particularly insightful). Charles Mahoney’s ...”

“... American Ambassadors to Japan – Thomas Foley, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael Armacost, the president of the Brookings Institution, and Walter Mondale, Carter’s Vice-President – wrote a joint letter to the Washington Post denouncing Congress for its willingness even to think about helping former American slave labourers get ...”

“... Blairite vision of popular culture. Where the previous hosts had been drunkenly offensive, Michael Wojas was defensive – a much worse thing in a barman. He was off his face and paranoid, which eventually led to the club closing down. To be fair, the smoking ban and a change in the drinking laws prepared the way, but the Colony was enamoured of past ...”

“... gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides. When the Romantic painter Benjamin Robert Haydon heard news of the discovery he wrote excitedly to his friend ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring ...”

“... 1960s, a café on the island of Capri. She was doing the Times crossword. Greene and his friend Michael Richey came in from Mass at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take ...”

“... collective biography includes some lesser yet representative lights (the tub-thumping novelist Robert Hugh Benson) and excuses some glaring omissions (Gerard Manley Hopkins). Some of her choices do not come off. Siegfried Sassoon, whose writing had petered out before his conversion, adds little to the theme, while a chapter on Elizabeth Anscombe does not ...”

“... poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done in the name of our nation, in the name of history. Inside we were cleansing history, concentrating on those aspects of our past which ...”

“... spare, usually shorn of adverbs and adjectives, and her plots were similarly unencumbered. When Michael Chabon decries the tyranny of the ‘contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory short story – a.k.a. the New Yorker short story’, it’s Taylor who is probably to blame. She thought that dramatic situations were unnecessary: normal ...”

“... marked between academics and curators who worked on premodern periods – the Renaissance expert Michael Baxandall, for example, was greatly respected in both worlds – and some curators of 20th-century art are much admired in the academy (the Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah ...”

“... writings of the Church Fathers and biblical commentaries, he also had works by Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Montaigne, Petrarch, Tasso and Boccaccio. The earl of Leicester’s library at Penshurst included books in many languages on the latest in beekeeping, drainage, poetry, forestry, military strategy, heraldry, optics and surgery.Sometimes a ...”

“... terrible to her – exactly what isn’t yet clear. Parker and Barbara then go to an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures (Parker hates them), to a restaurant (Parker throws up), and, the next evening, to a motel, where Barbara pretends to be a prostitute. The next time they indulge in some sexual role-playing in the same motel, Barbara dresses up as ...”

“... ally? Paradoxically, this very inversion has led to unpredictable opposition. It was Congressman Robert Dornan of California, the classic Orange Country patriot and flag-waver, who said this week that ‘American boys don’t die for emirs.’ Those who harbour more general reservations are thrown back on irony. Not only did King Hussein seem like ‘one of ...”

“... ranks of Conservative MPs and special advisers and in the Telegraph. The most famous of them is Michael Portillo, ironically the son of an émigré Spanish Republican, who found his way to the Conservative Party by way of Cowling’s teaching and patronage. For all his success as a guru of the right, in strictly party political terms Cowling is a flamboyant ...”

“... don’t know exactly why, it probably alludes to the drama’s ritual, even sacrificial origins. Robert Cowan remarks that tragedy ‘was born under tyranny but flowered under democracy’, though Mitchell Greenberg notes that in the 17th century tragic theatre enjoyed a golden period in an age of political absolutism. It is also worth asking why the decline ...”