“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the life of the stylist, an image of a brilliant individual stretched on the rack of his own powers of imagination and goaded to high heaven by the trials of being gifted. Stevenson’s was a life full of creative compulsions – including the compulsion to be compulsive – and more than other writers he stepped into the role, appearing always to ...”

“... American idiom’ everywhere else. His businessman father, of English descent, grew up in St Thomas in the Virgin Islands; his mother, a frustrated painter, came from Puerto Rico. After high school in Switzerland and New York City, Williams took a degree in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Hilda Doolittle (later H.D.) and ...”

“... as to those who tried a hopeless armed rising in 1848. Bew unearths a fascinating prophecy made by Thomas D’Arcy McGee (ex-revolutionary turned successful Irish emigrant) immediately afterwards: The people are not to blame that there has not been a revolution. Next time they must trust in local leaders like the Raparees and the Catalonian chiefs – fierce ...”

“... of opinion. What were once social democratic parties now rely largely on the votes of what Thomas Piketty has called the ‘Brahmin left’: the liberal-minded yet privileged section of society, whose one shared experience is higher education.In recent years, as liberalism has faltered, universities have been dragged into political conflicts to which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in trenches. In Black Garden (2003), his authoritative book on the recent history of the region, Thomas de Waal writes that ‘in untangling the roots of the Karabakh conflict, we should first of all dismiss the idea that this was an “ancient conflict”. Both the form and the content of the Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute date back little more than one hundred ...”

“... whom are basically human (hobbits, dwarfs, the men of Gondor and Rohan), some superhuman in both powers and goodness (elves, wizards, men of royal blood), some superhuman but evil (ringwraiths), some subhuman but sturdy with it (orcs, trolls). There are no monks or monasteries; in fact there is no religious activity on Middle Earth at all.The story begins in ...”

“... region had plenty of liberals, but a category that includes both Miranda – who corresponded with Thomas Paine, participated in the American and French Revolutions and led Venezuela’s break from Spain – and Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s strongman for around 30 years at the turn of the 20th century, is as volatile as the politics that the term ...”

“... increased sensitivity came from a ‘nervous irritability’ rather than the ‘more delicate powers of discrimination’ which elevated the male. The white hegemony was safe for men, and only men. White men’s acute sensitivity hasn’t, it seems, made them sympathetic surgeons or physicians. The insensitivity of doctors to suffering is a commonplace in ...”

“... and his playing, as Berry writes, ‘upon widespread suspicions that castrati had hidden powers’. Castrati like Tenducci could move easily and regularly between Italy and England and make and spend legendary amounts of money. They could move close to power. Farinelli, for example, was enticed to Madrid in 1737 ‘to sing away the psychotic ...”

“... of the word ‘Erastian’ to portray a clerical estate beaten into submission by the secular powers. The early Elizabethan bishops, far from meekly accepting an unlimited royal supremacy, saw themselves as the heirs of St Ambrose, who by rebuking and humbling emperors had made them willing instrumemts of God’s will. Returning from the exile they had ...”