“... he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said ...”

“... the story between the sense that Olga’s grievances, which eventually grate on the (male) reader, may owe something to her physical condition and the sense that she could well, though ill, have her husband’s number. Not many would finish the story thinking that its author was against higher education for women on the grounds that it turned them into ...”

“... freedom, this commits us to establishing political equality as a substantive ideal’. His readers may suspect that, in recovering neo-roman thought, he hopes not merely for its circulation but for its application: that in writing about Liberty before Liberalism he is looking forward to liberty after it. However that ...”

“... respect Parliament’s legislation but at the same time to stand up to abuses of executive power, may be thought to have done at least as much as their US counterparts to sustain constitutional principle. Written or unwritten, a constitution is only as valuable as the principles it diffuses, a process in which the courts can play an obscurantist or a ...”

“... great mystery’ of the president’s ‘power over the very continuance of the world’ may seem excessive, but he’s channelling, so he claims, Dick Cheney, who appears to believe that the president, by virtue of his control of the nuclear bomb, is freed from all constitutional – and even ordinary ethical – restraints. The meaning of ...”

“... must, I’m afraid, be largely a catalogue of complaints. The first, with which many of the others may seem to be related, concerns the title, and the fact that the subject is so named throughout the book. Even on the thousandth repetition it still seems embarrassing. P.N. Furbank, in his biography of 1977-8, uses the surname throughout. As a young man Furbank ...”

“... in fallacy. The first is the quest for ‘levels’ of meaning in literary and other works. A poem may allow several readings (literal, allegorical, metaphorical, and so on), which develop with its movement, and take their structure from the narrative which unites them. Dante, in the Convivio, describes four such ‘levels’ of meaning, and the tradition ...”

“... up – and it will end up, as with all other poets whatsoever, by having its ups and downs – one may certainly say now that his work has not been digested, by those who reckon they have a digestion for such things, in the way that that of Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Hardy has been, to say nothing of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral ...”

“... he noted: ‘Formerly I should have jumped at such an opening. I am now too far advanced. Yet I may go.’ It’s like Crusoe feeling he can’t use the ship-wrecked money but then deciding to keep it, accelerated to the tempo of farce. One isn’t sure whether the social climbing has abated or whether a need to say so has developed: the distinction ...”

“... not just in it?’ Nagel says he’s ‘using the term “religious temperament” in a way that may seem illegitimate to those who are genuinely religious’, but it won’t seem illegitimate to those engaged in what Johnston calls the ‘truly religious … life’, only to most of those who are ordinarily thought of as religious, those who are counted as ...”

“... 11 May 2000. I’m driving comfortably up the M74 through the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard ...”

“... make Dallas. It is recognised that life in the states of the South-West has taken in the past, and may yet take again, a distinctive shape: but the distinction is dealt with by allowing that the life is, like the landscapes where it happens, picturesque and bizarre. And after all ‘picturesque’ and ‘bizarre’ are epithets that we need not withhold from ...”

“... by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence.* There’s a world of difference between the phrase ‘you’re altogether too thin-skinned’ and ‘you’re too thin-skinned altogether.’ The latter, Dolan ...”

“... last time I made the wrong choice. (Could I hit someone with a baseball bat? Perhaps.) This may be completely unnecessary. Or it might not. The Women’s Freedom Center of Brattleboro, Vermont has advised me to leave at once for my mother’s home in DC: ‘We don’t know what’s going on in his head.’ The director of victim services at the Vermont ...”

“... of grave rituals all signal belief of some kind, but the beliefs of the prehistoric millennia may have been as different from one another as any one of them was from the later documented religions; and the changes from one practice to another, like the change from long barrows to stone circles, or the later and sudden abandonment of henges, even the ...”