“... plays do survive – Thomas Drue’s The Duchess of Suffolk, Davenport’s King John and Matilda, Arthur Wilson’s The Swisser, or Glapthorne’s Albertus Wallerstein – and others preserve a sketchy existence through the records of censorship and prosecution. Massinger causes Miss Heinemann some difficulty. She (rightly) contrasts the fundamentally ...”

“... in the order in which they were written, the Garden of Eden is followed by the Court of King Arthur, where Eve’s daughters prove no less dangerous than she herself had been. It’s touch and go, for example, in the scene from Sir Gawain where the knight is visited in his bed-chamber by Bertilak’s wife: He sees her so glorious, so gaily attired. So ...”

“... among immigrants themselves. The number of feminists teaching in the various disciplines also does little to help the case for patriotism, for, not only has patriotism been associated with male chauvinism, it also seems to depend on local, geographical identities, whereas the cause of women generally looks to universal standards of equality and justice. Among ...”

“... due course, Edward himself was to become the first Saxon saint to be formally canonised at Rome. Little remains of Edward’s building, however, for in the 1240s the Plantagenet king Henry III set himself to reconstruct the Abbey in honour of the royal saint. Henry was a sincere devotee of Edward, and the reality of his piety cannot be doubted, manifesting ...”

“... Didion and hotels: My interest in [Didion’s heroine] and her hotel life, a state of mind, has little to do with some misguided romantic notion of living such a life myself. But I find sense and a kind of solace in Didion’s daring to show that the ‘game’, the ‘plot’, the ‘set-up’, the ‘whatever you want to call it’ operates around a ...”

“... to her father (after she revealed the hidden six-shooter): ‘You’ve got yourself one helluva little lady there.’ Later, Nichols herself stands up to the Mob while working as a showgirl (‘You got class, kid’). Forthright on both race and gender issues, she insists on prosecuting and sending down a prominent lawyer for attempted rape (‘when a woman ...”

“... and is riled to this day that the fine players he warmed to there many years ago, the six-hitting Arthur Wellard and the beefy opener, Harold Gimblett – who impressed me no end once by returning the ball full toss to the wicket-keeper from the boundary underarm: his forearms looked to measure as many inches around as my teenage thighs – never got to play ...”

“... She suggests compellingly that his early interest in Sappho was connected to his relationship with Arthur Hallam, and that he discovered his own identity as a poet partly through his rewritings of Sappho. The chapter is flawed only by the suggestion that Tennyson’s response to the ‘body’ of Sappho’s text must be seen as murder or rape, although any ...”

“... after it was announced that the pit was to be closed along with nineteen others across Britain. Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM, decided to use the union’s rule 41 to call strikes on an area by area basis rather than holding a national ballot. Union leaders in Nottinghamshire and other smaller coalfields such as Leicestershire raised ...”

“... of politics, of which the revival could be seen as a high-toned version. He seems to have taken little interest in James Connolly, the most intellectually fascinating of the Easter Rising’s leaders, perhaps because he saw Connolly’s Marxism as promoting a linear conception of history at odds with his own cyclical view. He tried to read Capital, but ...”

“... how long he can preserve this state of innocence. To explore this question we need to go a little into the mental space of diaries at large. But let it be admitted first that whatever else a journal may or may not be good for, it is a good subject for the attentions of an editor. By definition attuned to the private and familiar (and to perceiving them ...”

“... nor gout, have no fear of corns or that another man should kick my shins … To be sure, I am a little awkward at running but then, to make amends, I’ll hop with any man in town’ – is at once absurd and defiantly courageous. For roughly three decades in the mid-18th century Foote was England’s pre-eminent stage comic, the toast of the clubs and ...”

“... part responsible for his widespread neglect. Even so broad-minded and widely-read a philosopher as Arthur Danto has said that he finds Dewey’s work without interest, because lacking in ‘structure’. Ayer found (and, I imagine, Williams finds) in Dewey only a rubbery amorphous mass of neologisms (‘problematic situation’, ‘transaction’ etc), a mass ...”

“... Of these recent decades, the 1970s is the most reviled. I once had a colleague who’d been a little girl in the 1970s, and not a particularly poor one, yet she would shudder and say: ‘Oh, it was like Eastern Europe then, all stews and root vegetables and wet holidays in caravans.’ Her austere picture didn’t fit with my own memories, which are of ...”

“... greatest poetic rivals), noticing some of the telling details that catch us off guard: Three little girls with broken shoes And hard sharp coughs, Three little girls who sold us sweets Too near the shells, Three little girls with names of saints And angels’ eyes …In a letter to ...”