“... the Whig-Tory conflict as being largely between two rival mythologies of the Civil War. Even Brian Harrison, writing on Drink and the Victorians, is moved to remark that for many Dissenters in the Temperance Movement, the Civil War was very much a live issue, and there is surely a 17th-century legacy in Gladstone’s fear, in 1832, that the First Reform Bill ...”

“... on Anne’s death is unintentionally comical. ‘Sorry to hear your bad news!’ The exclamation mark is hilariously inappropriate though it’s quite hard to pinpoint why. 20 February. It’s years since I was on Desert Island Discs but these days I’d find it much easier to choose the eight records I don’t want than those that I do. I don’t ever want ...”

“... way of absorbing a text is to write on the book itself. It was common for Renaissance readers to mark key passages by underlining them or drawing lines and pointing fingers in the margin – the early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and ...”

“... Angeles and was hired on arrival by the patron of the Los Angeles Times, Colonel (later General) Harrison Gray Otis. Lummis helped to forge the booster image described by Kevin Starr in his book Inventing the dream: ‘a mélange of mission myth (originating in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona), obsession with climate, political conservatism (symbolised in the ...”

“... Bulwer-Lytton married in 1827 an Irishwoman, Rosina Wheeler. His mother severed his allowance as a mark of her displeasure. This forced him to write for money and increased the attraction for him of déclassé men. The life of Bill Gawtrey, in Night and Morning (1841), becomes steadily seedier after he graduates from Cambridge until he is reduced to operating ...”

“... published by the National Portrait Gallery to accompany the BBC series of the same name, Brian Harrison, the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, observes that we are hardly alone ‘in placing the great at the centre of our national myth’: If Lloyd George and Winston Churchill epitomise national resistance to Germany in ...”

“... of my country and you’re not even Irish, you English cunt. You can stick it up your bollocks.’ Mark points out that ‘you’re not even Irish, you English cunt’ is like something out of Beckett. Andy wonders whether ‘you can stick it up your bollocks’ is an Irish expression or a stroke of inspiration on Keane’s part. Myself, I take a more ...”

“... the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison, who proposed a prehistoric and peaceful woman-centred civilisation in Greece. The discovery of Palaeolithic ‘Venus figurines’, statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to support the notion. D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Rudyard ...”

“... known as novelists, while others, such as Davie, Enright and Holloway, went on to make a greater mark as critics. Since it was challenging the old metropolitan literary elite and repudiating the authority of (European) high culture and (international) high modernism, the new generation of writers was taken to represent not just an emphatically English ...”

“... anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much closer ...”

“... enough, have a great deal invested in such matters. Value follows intention. There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work – is it any good? – is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are ...”

“... unexpectedly in post in 2005). In an article published in Balliol’s alumni newsletter in 2004 to mark his and Griffin’s retirement, Murray wrote: ‘We are the last generation of automatic classicists, coming from an era when a relatively high proportion of the brighter schoolboys and girls was channelled into Classical VI forms and on to Oxford and ...”

“... McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an ...”

“... southern edge of Ireland with a blown-up inset of the Lake District. The Longman’s decision to mark Gaelic-speaking areas on a map of the British Isles announces its devolutionary agenda as clearly as the new Norton’s move to balance its traditional map of London by another of the Empire honours its growing commitment to a generously cosmopolitan vision ...”

“... and Captain Ahab, the thinking whale’s man. For Melville, as for Chase, malice is the authentic mark of the whale’s intelligence. A century and a half after the book was published, that association has become harder to sustain. The malign and the dangerous haven’t disappeared from the picture – far from it – but they’ve fallen away from the ...”