“... galley, the truly superior beings should strive to be masters, not slaves: ‘Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency.’ A stronger type of human being would tear off the veil of hypocrisy, otherwise known as reason and moral virtue, do away with guilt, celebrate instinct, preach violence and follow the call of ...”

“... to run over all he had in him and to share it with everyone he could get to listen. As it became more and more likely that he would die, he began writing Too close to the bone – this must have been in March 1988. A few weeks later Jacqueline Rose and I went away with Jen White and Allon to spend a night in Wells and to ...”

“... other novelists meditating on that inscrutable question, she comes up with answers that reveal more about her own convictions and aspirations than they do about the possible conditions of prehistory. The Temple of My Familiar is founded on an ancient utopia. Lissie recalls an immeasurably distant past when men and women lived apart, coming together only ...”

“... a company of Blunderers and Blockheads, and that there is a Commentator in the World, one Dr. B, more Learned, Accurate, Ingenious, Judicious and Illustrious than all of them put together. This representation of Bentley as a figure of overweening arrogance was one which I, like most students of English literature, was primed to accept. In The Dunciad in ...”

“... memoirs and mostly familiar to historians. Old friends include George Robertson, Joseph Mitchell, Thomas Somerville and Ramsay of Ochtertyre. The accounts are separated into themes, such as school, factory and mine, leisure, crime (though none of the memorialists claim active participation in this). The excerpts are long enough to carry the style and emphasis ...”

“... the 1590s, some of them very distinguished, and of their efforts to exclude one who would become more distinguished than any of them. Blackfriars is an area rich in Shakespearean associations, invisible but well attested. Down an alleyway running south off Carter Lane lies New Bell Yard. Now dominated by the glass-fronted atrium of the Grange St Paul’s ...”

“... to Thompson’s interest through the correspondence columns of the TLS. In the loft Thompson found more than a hundred boxes containing the Muggletonian archive, which Noakes, on a wartime journey to Covent Garden market, had rescued when the Muggletonian Reading Room in Bishopsgate was blitzed. These boxes have now found a home in the British Library as ...”

“... confidence to a state of society in which the different orders and classes of men will contribute more effectively to the support of each other than they have hitherto done.’ The essential structure of society, however, would remain unaltered: scientific progress would demonstrate more clearly than ever that ‘the ...”

“... idea that parents weren’t attached to their children touched a nerve among medievalists. More than thirty years ago, pioneering work by Shulamith Shahar and Barbara Hanawalt showed conclusively that Ariès was wrong. Not only did medieval people have a concept of childhood, adapting the sequential model of the ‘Ages of Man’ from classical ...”

“... citizen of a green and peaceful place, that made him conscious of impending doom? Nothing in his more or less idyllic childhood, his education at the Malin National School, his successful matriculation from the Franciscans at Gormanstown, his escape from university – first from Dublin, then from North London Polytechnic, and finally from Freiburg (where he ...”

“... rival – a defensive response to the threat of automation – but we come to see that Melania is more concerned by what Klara’s presence means for Josie. Klara at first assumes that her role is to keep Josie company, to keep her loneliness at bay, but it gradually appears that the Mother may have more sinister plans for ...”

“... that had come about since their last sojourn. In 1292, in Shropshire, Alice Knotte complained that Thomas Champeneys ‘detaineth from her seven shillings in money and a surcoat of the value of three shillings’. ‘Alice can get no justice at all,’ she protested, ‘seeing that she is poor and that this Thomas is ...”

“... must be understood as discursively produced.’ (Actually, I don’t think they do agree, but more about that later.) If we take the point, then the history of sexual knowledge becomes the history of the making of sexual knowledge’s objects. As such, it has a certain narrative coherence for Foucault but scarcely, if at all, for Hall and Porter. We learn ...”

“... for army officers, and the remaining 13 were given over to Army Other Ranks. In all, they listed more than 700,000 names. It was as if the Cenotaph in Whitehall and every war memorial on every village green had been compressed into a few cubic feet of paper and ink. The death of my great-great-grandfather, my mother’s mother’s father’s father, a year ...”

“... and I went to Wexford for the launch of a new history of the 1798 Rising, The Year of Liberty by Thomas Pakenham. The Rising was important for us: from our housing estate we could see Vinegar Hill where ‘our side’, the rebels, had made their last stand. From early childhood I knew certain things (I hesitate to say ‘facts’) about the Rising: how the ...”