“... an old hen’. Ginsberg, on the other hand, is always making remarks like the remark he made to Mark Van Doren in his Columbia years: ‘I want to be a saint, a real saint when I am still young, for there is much work to do.’ This kind of upfrontness has been found both embarrassing and liberating, and it is in complete opposition to the deep ‘quarrel ...”

“... through the world of phenomena. Then in 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays; in 1897, J.J. Thompson discovered the electron; in 1914, Rutherford discovered the proton – and all at once a new branch of physics had come into existence: elementary particle theory, dealing with the hidden realities, the fundamental entities that underlie the observed ...”

“... which is as pleasant perhaps as any in the World’. Perhaps most intriguing, as described in Mark Purcell’s The Country House Library (2017), is the earl of Northumberland’s ‘Paradise’ room on the visitor-discouraging top floor of the Chapel Tower at Wressle Castle in East Yorkshire. Here the earl seems to have sat and read in something like an ...”

“... was a sad slump compared to the antics of his theatrical peers, notably those of his ex-wife Emma Thompson. He does much better with Poirot. The element of self-pastiche is never far away, but it is very discreet, as is his supposedly Belgian accent – not realistic, of course, but not stealing the scene all the time either. He is athletic, gets into ...”

“... has any article of faith in a free economy, even though that same public is quick enough off the mark in chasing the best bargain buys in the nearest hypermarket. The Green Belt is evidence not so much of public support for planning restrictions, because they promote the common good, as of the use of planning regulations to protect property values and ...”

“... obscured by a succession of socialist expositors from his Fabian biographer G.D.H. Cole to E.P. Thompson. Believing that Cobbett’s life coincided with the Industrial Revolution’s most violent assault on English labouring conditions (something many economic historians would now dispute), this school of writers interpreted his abiding interest in rural ...”

“... edition aims to bring us closer to the person, so the editors are mindful of the ghost of Lawrance Thompson, the biographer and editor of Frost who was eager to disabuse readers about the personality they thought they knew. Thompson’s biography – shot through with personal grudges and unverifiable anecdotes – portrayed ...”

“... hobo, who talked at him continuously for the thousand miles from Winnipeg to Churchill via Thompson. The furnishings, food and remarkable happenings in Dally’s Diner on Logan Street, Aberdeen, South Dakota, as our hero waits for the snow geese to leave the prairie sloughs and sail northwards on a following wind. Fiennes is an observant traveller, and ...”

“... in Adam Roberts’s book It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (Elliott & Thompson, £14.99), 41 per cent of Americans and 58 per cent of white evangelical Christians believe Jesus will return before 2050, while 83 per cent of Muslims in Afghanistan, 72 per cent in Iraq and 68 per cent in Turkey anticipate the arrival of the Mahdi (the ...”

“... is not inconsistent to recognise that an old enemy is no longer such a danger as an old ally. E.P. Thompson would like Cobbett to have a stricter political theory. He wrote in 1965: ‘Cobbett helped to create and nourish the anti-intellectualism and the theoretical opportunism (masked as “practical” empiricism) which has remained an important ...”

“... Grazia thinks that Hamlet the play is not about consciousness, and that Hamlet the prince does not mark the emergence of a modern psychological heroism as Hegel, Marx and (in his way) Coleridge believed. Instead, she brings to the play a dose of materialist historicism: the hero’s chief problem is the loss of his succession to the crown of Denmark. This is ...”

“... Deller has been commissioned as part of an extensive programme of lottery-funded commemorations to mark next year’s bicentenary. Questions remain about the build-up to 16 August and who was at fault that day. Donald Read’s exposition of events, published in 1958, remains a standard text. Read regarded Peterloo as a massacre, but argued that it resulted ...”

“... that its confident materialism was something of an embarrassment to him, though it made a lasting mark by insisting that Britain, like France and the United States, had experienced one of the revolutions that shaped the modern world.Hill had a relatively quiet war: a transfer to Whitehall saved him from the rigours of serving as an infantry officer. He had ...”

“... evidence of stupidity on hand – and none more eye-catching than that left behind him by ‘Thompson of Sunderland’, a vandal out of the North who had scrawled his name and address on Pompey’s column in Alexandria in letters that Flaubert claims could be read ‘a quarter of a league away’. More significantly stupid than ...”

“... to consult the Harmsworth family papers, though the two most thorough previous biographers, Lee Thompson (in 2000) and Pound and Harmsworth, did so as well. Creditably, he does not hide how much of his account retraces these authors’ steps; there are 144 footnote references to their two books, and 57 to Brendon’s essay. He is, as ever, industrious in ...”