“... the novel, the dominant literary form of the modern age.’ If we consider these claims, we may agree that Harrington’s influence was a consequence of the experience of 1640-60, for his work, like the writings of Filmer and Hobbes, was a response to the crises of that time, though it would not have been what it was had he not also drawn so fully on ...”

“... best novel yet. Certainly it is his most ingenious. But this familiar way of putting things may contain a mistake, a mistake which is part of the subject-matter of Roth’s book. ‘Best novel yet’ implies a future of prosperous activity which may be barmecidal. The novelist-hero of Henry James’s story ‘The ...”

“... from the passage above; but Keynes had ‘never said a truer thing’. Here is the theme of Richard Cockett’s study, Thinking the Unthinkable, which has seized on a superb subject. Using archival and oral sources to supplement the published record, it traces the activities of a number of intellectual pressure groups, or think-tanks, in proselytising ...”

“... and subversion in Harriot’s text’ will give us a fuller understanding of Henry IV. An example may serve to show how Greenblatt’s approach works. One of his essays, to my mind the most successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to ...”

“... is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that Richard Fletcher has taken as his subject in The Conversion of Europe. What concerns him is not the conversion of this or that people but all medieval conversions (including conversions between Christianity and its two rival monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, which ...”

“... to death for murder and again for piracy. He was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping on Friday, 23 May 1701, and it is said that he was drunk at the time. Professor Ritchie’s account of Kidd’s last ten or twelve years is the result of an immense amount of reading: it goes deeply into the economic and cultural background of buccaneering and ...”

“... being taken to try to deal with the subtle and sometimes subconscious forms of discrimination that may have undesirable effects on girls’ aspirations. Thirdly, there have been many changes to the curriculum to meet newly recognised needs. These include the introduction of important subjects such as health education, provision for minority-group languages ...”

“... or writing poetry or applying for life insurance, is an affair of the imagination. As a certain Richard Price explained in 1778, paper money must be thought of as the sign of a sign. If coin signified real value, paper, ‘owing its currency to opinion’, had ‘only a local and imaginary value’.* We have no choice but to re-imagine it daily. I looked ...”

“... reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without exception bizarre, baffling or psychotic. In ...”

“... a conscience can be uneasy bedfellows (though preferable to privilege without a conscience). They may give rise to dislocated feelings of guilt, which can lead to a perverse envy of the deprived – how lucky they are to be free of these feelings of guilt – or a conviction that privilege is, in fact, a form of deprivation, particularly deprivation of ...”

“... seen a play ‘where there was a man on a tree, and blood ran down’. For Shaw, such knowledge may have been worse than nothing. Christ represented on stage, as on crucifixes and rood-screens, was no better than an idol, an icon in the sense that has given rise to the term ‘iconoclast’: a fraudulent substitute for true religion that must be ...”

“... to stretch up to thee, nor hands to join before thee; my feet are cut off and my knees, so that I may not bow them to thee.’ How can we explain this carnival of cruelty? Theologically, the saints were of course imitating Christ, who saved the world by his suffering, so martyrdom in the primitive Church was prima facie evidence of sanctity. It was also one ...”

“... is probably why her book does not attempt a full assessment of his abilities as a commander. It may be for the same reason that there is no serious exploration of the tension, which she has clearly observed, between divergent contemporary perceptions of him. On the one hand, he inspired the comment ‘an Englishman gone Italian is the devil ...”

“... his celebrated warning that ‘the popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon.’ Mellor may have meant what he said, but he was certainly not speaking for the rest of the Government. As far as the majority of his colleagues were concerned the newspapers had not even walked through the saloon’s swing doors, and Calcutt was just a device to quell ...”

“... There is already a lot of biographical writing about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to indicate disapproval of Crick, who, much to her annoyance, had lawyers good enough to ensure that he was able to publish it anyway, quotations and all ...”