“... is, basically, a series of quotes from a venerable collection of Whig historians: Macaulay, Stephen, Beljame, and Legouis and Cazamian. Curiously, he deals only in the most general terms with Addison’s writing; the main concern of his discussion of the bourgeois ‘public sphere’ is to define the paradigmatic ‘speech act’ performed in the ...”

“... silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure’, if we may borrow a phrase from another arch-formalist, Stephen Dedalus. Such a view ignores the special status of feminine beauty in Western culture. There is no intrinsic reason why woman, naked or clothed, should be the supreme aesthetic subject of art: she has held that place because an appropriative male desire ...”

“... something very much more – accept the fact that this may never be? And if there was once, when young, a romantic wish to die, and a courting of death, what then? Will there be guilt, and a dark attempt to shift the blame?’ These are not real questions. Long before we can dial through to Ontario and press our own special insights on the author, the ...”

“... a spy is arrested’ was set up in type but never printed: the Westminster’s editor, Stephen Spender’s uncle, was mildly pro-German in 1912, and he also turned down a piece called ‘In Fortified Germany’. But the third and fourth articles made it – Lawrence’s debut as a travel writer – and they already exhibit their author’s hedgehog ...”

“... could expose Mason to comparison, not only with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its ...”

“... 20-year-old maid inaugurated a similar union, the Scottish Federation of Domestic Workers. Jessie Stephen told the assembled crowd of mistresses and maids that she was ‘out to preach the divine doctrine of discontent’. Soon blacklisted by employers – one of the dangers of unionisation – she made her way to London and joined forces with Oliver. The ...”

“... the US , going back to seven fabled three-hour tussles between the Illinois senatorial candidates Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln in 1858 (which certainly did involve direct confrontation), all on the single subject of slavery. In the 1920s, the League of Women Voters sponsored a ten-month series of radio debates, not between presidential candidates but ...”

“... Commonwealth immigrants as well. ‘Sorry, love,’ kindly immigration officials would say to us young Australians, directing us to the long non-British entry line at Customs. ‘It’s a shame, but we have to do it.’I tried appealing to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for special permission to go on the British exchange, but my application was ...”

“... listening. When I asked Abdi what the land here would normally look like at this time of year, a young man shoved a cellphone into my hand to show me a photo of himself reclining in a field of tall green grass. He pointed to a patch of bare earth behind him, where the photo had been taken, and laughed. War rarely feels far away. The wrecks of Siad Barre’s ...”

“... embraced in non-Christian examples: illusion is the domain of spirits. Among Christians (as Stephen Greenblatt has observed) these qualities are more problematic. Mimetic art – especially theatre – has troubled many Western thinkers, Christian or otherwise. Christianity is founded on a series of truth claims – the gospel, the saving act, the ...”

“... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...”

“... which was both male and female, consisted of dozens of national groups, ranged from the very young to the quite old, and fought on many fronts. What can we learn about such an army from the several dozen memoirs and diaries, the letters and the interview notes the author has in her possession? A great deal. The most urgent and interesting questions about ...”

“... be arrested this morning are violent and the police hold in their collective memory the death of Stephen Oake, the Special Branch detective stabbed by a suspect with a kitchen knife when a house he was searching hadn’t been secured. Much better, the theory goes, to do a lot of shouting and avoid anything more serious. For the team I’m accompanying, these ...”

“... by Holbein with her old-fashioned head-dress and pursed little lips, becomes here ‘a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence, and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise’. Mantel’s pictorialism can become almost imagist, in the Ezra Pound sense, when she is describing Jane. So when she first touches ...”

“... terms. After the death of his friend Hendrik Andersen’s brother in 1902, James wrote to the young sculptor: ‘The sense that I can’t help you, see you, talk to you, touch you, hold you close & long, or do anything to make you rest on me, & feel my deep participation – this torments me, dearest boy, & makes me ache for you, & for myself.’ There ...”