“... James O’Coigly, a Catholic priest, was a United Irishman who, sometimes disguised as ‘Captain Jones’ was travelling in England in the year of the Irish rebellion, as courier to the ‘Jacobin’ underground. With Arthur O’Connor and others, he was arrested when about to board ship for France, and a sensationally seditious address was found in his ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.I ...”

“... from ‘Fenians out of jail’, some of whom, like the Irish-American poet John Boyle O’Reilly, were now eminently respectable figures: but ‘They only fawned for dollars on the blood-dyed Clan-na-Gael’ was a just, if unkind comment on the Parnellite use of Irish-American revolutionary organisations for fund-raising. It might be ...”

“... they all ate so much, and their conduct was such,/That it killed that Old Man of the East’). John St Loe Strachey was eight when he met Lear, and later recalled that ‘he knew a great deal about children, and they knew that he knew it and he knew that they knew that he knew it and so a complete and (as he might have said) abject harmony was ...”

“... Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is culturally organised and politically structured. In Germany, where no major ...”

“... massacre in Guyana in 1978, in which the leader of the People’s Temple, the Reverend Jim Jones, persuaded nine hundred of his followers to join him in suicide by drinking Cool-Aid laced with cyanide, is a constant reminder of the dangers to which the charismatic leaders of cults – or New Religious Movements, to use the more neutral term – can ...”

“... of November’, one of the poems in a book which William Morris wrote out for Georgiana Burne-Jones, claiming that when the line ‘Beyond these four walls hung with pain and dreams’ projects into the surrounding border it shows how Morris ‘translated the frame of his text into an iconograph of the “four walls” named in the lines’ and that ...”

“... contains a passage germane here: ‘A play of Shakespeare’s and a play of Henry Arthur Jones’s are essentially of the same type, the difference being that Shakespeare is very much greater and Mr Jones very much more skilful.’ This explains a lot when Updike criticises Degas’s ‘unevenness of ...”

“... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...”

“... a ‘newer, more flexible picture of Chartism’. First comes a long examination by G. Stedman Jones of ‘The Language of Chartism’. He insists that nervous contemporaries gave a wrong lead to historians by regarding Chartism not as the political programme it professed to be but as essentially social discontent, ‘novel and threatening’. In ...”

“... left out or transmuted. In another valuable work of last year, The European Miracle,* E. L. Jones counts as one of a ‘mighty triad’ of 18th-century advances, along with administrative reform and technological invention, the control of smallpox by inoculation. McManners is convinced that this must have had a profound psychological effect by fanning ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who ...”

“... of Parliament. A decade later, a coterie of young, untried artists including Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Morris set out to adorn the walls of the Oxford Union with similar subjects. But neither Dyce nor the high-spirited youths were qualified to paint in fresco, and the Oxford pictures decayed and disappeared even more rapidly than the ones at ...”

“... have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan ...”