“... ecclesiastical tradition. The high point was reached more than three hundred years ago when Sir Thomas Browne published his Religio Medici, and Johnson’s indebtedness to this tradition is seen best in his borrowing of two habits common to such books: the sarcastic ridiculing of all secular opposition and a pious refusal to believe that atheism really ...”

“... delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about Shakespeare. In fact, Voltaire was perfectly ready to concede that Shakespeare was possessed of real genius, though of a rough and ready kind, but in denying that he had ‘so much as a ...”

“... American, originally published in 1955, the insights in which still bite. Greene’s narrator, Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist who smokes opium, keeps a teenage Vietnamese mistress named Phuong and sounds like Greene himself, is befriended by Alden Pyle, a quiet young American who is trying to build a Third Force, neither Communist nor ...”

“... and an uncanny end. Against Camillo’s advice in the play, Morgan makes a wild dedication of his powers to unpath’d waters, undream’d shores, but his excess has method in it, however outlandish. As in the poem ‘Heaven’, and the remarkably achieved ‘Alphabet of Goddesses’. Jeffrey Wainright’s Selected Poems are taken from The Important Man ...”

“... to bridge the Cartesian gulf, philosophical anthropology relates our states of mind to our vital powers and through them to our being in the world; or again, it investigates the ways in which man in his status of ‘defective creature’ compensates for his vulnerability and ‘openness to the world’. All such enquiries proceed by reflecting on data which ...”

“... so creatively if the book had not made a huge impression ten years before. The witty knight – as Thomas Shelton, Cervantes’s contemporary and most sinewy English translator, termed Don Quixote – had ridden instantly into the world’s imagination along with his squire. Even so, Cervantes may have had one reason at least to be grateful to the apocryphal ...”

“... Darkened with Celts’ and Saxons’ blood’, composed in an idiom which melds Yeats and Edward Thomas. Times, or places, have changed since the poet of ‘Bone Dreams’ pushed ‘past philology and kennings’ in a retaliatory ‘invasion of England’. Still more fascinating is the case of a writer who leaves England for America ...”

“... 1930s into the literary forgeries perpetrated by two eminent men of the literary establishment, Thomas Wise and H. Buxton Forman. What seems most significant about that story, apart from its being half a century old, is that Carter and Pollard were dealers in rare books, who at the time of their celebrated Enquiry did not hold university ...”

“... impressive to the imagination. Talented writers have been drawn to the tale. One of them, Dylan Thomas, made nothing of it at all. Mr Edwards suggests that it made a difference that Burke was Irish. He does not mean that murder is Irish; nor does he say that ill-treated migrant or immigrant workers may fall to ill-treating and selling their own kind at ...”

“... There hasn’t been a conflict in decades with this potential for escalation among the nuclear powers. Three of the four major Cold War arms control treaties have been allowed to lapse. The risks were high enough already, but Russian missile strikes on former Nato training facilities near the Polish border have increased them. Some in the Anglosphere seem ...”

“... properly if the Allies trusted one another, and if they acted competently. When in 1941 two Danes, Thomas Sneum and Kjeld Pedersen, filmed a new kind of German radar station, then flew a homemade plane across the North Sea with their evidence, MI5 were first suspicious then ruined all but two frames of their film.Clandestine newspapers displayed a similar ...”

“... on’. What he wanted now was time to think and write, and with the help of the mischievous Thomas Schelling was offered a visiting post at Yale in 1956. Schelling had himself worked on the Marshall Plan and was to go on to many things, not the least of which were to advise Stanley Kubrick on Dr Strangelove and win a Nobel Prize in economics for his ...”

“... inept use of personification can also prompt the cortex-crunching Johnsonian boff to the head: in Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’, ‘his supplication to father Thames, to tell him who drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself.’ Johnson’s ...”

“... 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the shoddy detritus of ...”

“... of King’s (and Queen’s) Bench, which was not modest in its pretensions. ‘This court,’ Sir Thomas Fleming said, ‘is the jurisdiction of the queen herself. It is so high that in its presence other jurisdictions cease.’ It had, according to Coke in 1615, ‘the survey of all other courts’. Lord Chancellor Ellesmere sought to resist this ...”