“... In July​ 1657 William Wood, a young immigrant to Maryland, was paddling along a creek of the Patuxent River when he found a body floating in the water. Dragging the corpse to land, he discovered it was Harry Gouge, a servant of John Dandy’s, whose watermill Wood had just left. He fetched Dandy, who came with two other men ...”

“... embracing ‘as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning’. The young William Empson, who had been reading Graves for some while, adapted this insight for Seven Types of Ambiguity, which became one of the founding books of modern literary criticism; Riding later took him to task for stealing the idea. Close reading later got itself ...”

“... and runs riot; and there is also a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy.’ According to William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, in his Essays on Russian Novelists (1911), ‘your true Russian’ is notable for humility, love of theory, paralysis of the will, and a complete lack of ‘the healthy moderation of the Anglo-Saxon’. What, Phelps asks, is the ...”

“... the streets. After the event, radicals took Bellingham to their hearts. At his public execution William Cobbett, looking out from his cell window (he was in for political libel), ‘saw the half-horrified countenances’ of the crowd, the ‘mournful tears’ running down their faces and ‘heard the unanimous blessings’. He ascribed this to their ...”

“... described the moon as ‘sublimely still, and beautifully pale!’ In ‘On Bamborough Castle’, William Lisle Bowles praises a sublime ruin in lines that shake up Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth with a dash of Mary Robinson: Ye holy Towers that shade the wave-worn steep, Long may ye rear your aged brows sublime, Though, hurrying silent by, relentless ...”

“... falling into contempt with the people.’ Taxes were high and times were bad, and journalists like William Cobbett were radicalising popular opinion by lambasting ‘Old Corruption’. Parliament, Cobbett stormed, was ruining the nation it no longer represented. An oligarchy of aristocrats and financiers, having hijacked the Commons by means of electoral ...”

“... then governing the slave refuge colony of Sierra Leone, Zachary, like his fellow abolitionist William Wilberforce, believed the spread of the Gospel was a much greater cause. Blacks should be free to serve their – that is, his – God, and to take their proper places in the hierarchy of humanity that the evangelicals saw as ‘natural’, and essential ...”

“... tradition. There was scepticism from an early stage. Some sixty years after the History came out, William of Newburgh, a serious scholar, wrote Geoffrey off as a shameless fabricator, while Gerald of Wales told a story of a man who could see the laughing demons who came with lies: when he held the Gospel all the demons fled, but if it was replaced by ...”

“... and the red satin pants she had sewn were probably the least of her efforts. Doris’s father, William, held himself apart from all that. He seems to have been a silent, cold man – barely present to his children and wife. He taught music and gave voice lessons, conducted a choir and played the organ at the local Catholic church, although he was forced to ...”

“... at the time) to an upsurge of expansionist imperialism, while A.G. Gardiner, the biographer of Sir William Harcourt, spoke of ‘a tidal wave of Jingoism’, as ‘the arrogant nationalism of Mr Kipling and the glamour of Rhodes’s imperialism’ led the country to ‘strange adventures’. Nowadays the picture seems less clear. Imperial enthusiasm may have ...”

“... ended with her slapping him across the face. The tautness of the final film was due to the young William Wyler, who arrived on the set as director in September 1941. Under his aegis, the male characters faded into the background – earlier scripts had envisaged scenes of Clem and Vin at Dunkirk – while the women of the village moved ...”

“... lion come back to eternal life even though their parts were consumed and atomised? Certainly, the Christian martyrs must have hoped so. Eventually, the cannibal got laughed out of the philosophical arena by the Enlightenment and anthropological relativism, and has come in our time to reside either in the demented minds of characters who now entertain us in ...”

“... 1939. Whether Cameron holds to this notion of history, or whether it is rather a preoccupation of William Hague’s, is a matter of speculation. It was Cameron who negotiated the party’s departure from the quasi-Christian Democratic bloc in the European Parliament into the reactionary rag-bag where the Tory MEPs now ...”

“... the work of Mallarmé, Verlaine and Valéry, set him apart from his fellow pupils at Kimberley’s Christian Brothers College. In his late teens a chance conversation with the philosopher J.N. Findlay, whom he met on a cruise ship, inspired him to abandon the architecture course on which he had embarked at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and ...”

“... If the Primitifs looked back to Homeric rigour, the Nazarenes favoured medieval fantasy.The Christian dimensions of this revivalism lost traction as the 19th century progressed. But the religion of art, and – most of all – the religion of the artist, never went out of fashion. Several of them, including David and Courbet, set up studios on the sites ...”