“... casket. The simplicity of the stupa mound, reminiscent of the Buddha’s upturned begging bowl, may be said to represent extinction, completion, nirvana, the absolute. Decorating the surface of the dome were luxuriantly carved limestone slabs, and the stupa was surrounded by an ambulatory, pierced by four all of which were densely ornamented with sacred ...”

“... then in Indian history books and national folklore as a ‘friend of India’, and, strange as it may sound, nothing more. The adoration and idealising passion with which Andrews engaged with India make us engage with him as a sincere but rather bland generality, an ideal Englishman, and rarely as a person. We see him walking with Tagore and Gandhi, part ...”

“... one ‘turn’d for ... upright Ends’, no ‘jesting with truth’. One man’s truth, however, may be another man’s heresy, and Swift, with unequalled trenchancy, attacked all empirical and materialist progressivism as dangerous psychological projection. He puts Gulliver, not only in an academy of mad scientists, but in a utopia – Houyhnhnmland ...”

“... also suggests that in practice the great religious holidays – whatever Protestant visitors may have thought – did more economic good than harm, since ‘festivals generated work, and they were also occasions when it was possible to advertise and sell.’ Mackenney’s well-informed and vigorous study, which carries the reader along despite its many ...”

“... speechwriter, homosexual would-be rapist – stick in the gullet. The boys who stole the funeral may be an instance, then, of how a contemporary poem can be damaged by manifesting too visibly its affiliation to a conception of the sacred: the result is liable to seem altogether too palpably designing upon us. It is interesting that one goes instinctively for ...”

“... out to Southern blacks of his generation, but he suffered insult enough of a more polite kind. It may come as a shock, for a reader conditioned by three decades of agitation and legislation in favour of equal rights for American Negroes, to read of hotels in Boston and San Francisco, as well as Akron, Ohio and Green Bay, Wisconsin, refusing him service ...”

“... of that, there wasn’t anything famously fishy about Judas, though it’s been argued that there may have been something a touch ambivalent about the Nazerene himself; no lady-killer, at any rate. Tom emphatically did not get on with either his father or his mother, but he has and had that in common with many docile and patriotic heterosexuals. Moreover, as ...”

“... The blood at the altar flows from the veins of a sinner. Once again, to talk of the scaffolding may be to miss the poem. But Curnow, son of an Anglican priest who himself trained for the ministry before yielding to doubts and the world, seldom moves far, or for long, from the traditional symbolism that partly determined his habits of mind. He ...”

“... respectability, adducing the dramatic growth of the friendly societies, but even this virtue may have been rather tenuously ‘respectable’ at this level. There are many accounts of clean, well-kept, well-furnished working-class homes whose occupants lived from hand to mouth and pawned their nice possessions in times of hardship. Working-class ...”

“... our history’. In a sense, we always had it. As Paine wrote in The Rights of Man, ‘though you may keep a people ignorant, you cannot make them ignorant.’ Precisely what was done to the people and the roof timbers, the cattle and the ploughlands, of Sutherland and Ross, the Uists and Mull and Skye and Barra, has remained as a matter of burning fact in ...”

“... Southern Britons may be forgiven for thinking that most people in Scotland grew up in cottages among the purple bens, or in tenements dwarfed by shipyard cranes, or in douce villas where grace was said over every scone. This is the legacy of Scottish literature and Scottish comedy, which in the course of this century has replaced one romantic stereotype with another – J ...”

“... or at least unacknowledged their political pasts. Victor Farias’s recent claim that Heidegger may have supported the Nazis for more than the few months of his university rectorship and Ortwin de Graef’s discovery of de Man’s youthful contributions to the collaborationist paper Le Soir have thrown the European and American academies into ...”

“... between magic and religion, its theory of sacrifice, its development of Humean philosophy, may all in some ways have encouraged its wide popular standing – but, surely, not to any significant extent. Most of the readers of the News Chronicle or the Staffordshire Sentinel who avidly devoured all eulogies of the great man had not the slightest interest ...”

“... it gave for respectable touching (amplified by much mutual rubbing in of embrocation afterwards) may well have been – as Jock Phillips suggests writing of 19th-century New Zealand, but with a sidelong glance at the English public schools – a source of comforting closeness in a society where women were scarce or marginalised and the taboo against ...”

“... in the era of European expansion. Leafing through the atlases of a previous generation, we may draw comfort from the thought that all the pink bits (and other hues of Empire) once displayed with such pride were to vanish rather quickly. Yet their very presence, symbolic of the innumerable battles in which a handful of small European nations engaged and ...”