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“... poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he.’ This assertion by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe in November 1647 seems almost a cliché, as much part of the democratic history of England as the Magna Carta or the Tolpuddle Martyrs or Paine’s Rights of Man. Yet for two and a half centuries after Rainborowe said his piece, no one knew ...”

“... a three-volume anthology, Women Writing Latin: From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe. Two more women, an American medievalist, Rita Copeland, and a Dutch classicist, Ineke Sluiter, have now edited the monumental Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475, but it is populated exclusively by men even if two women write ...”

“... the sermon itself are, however, only mentioned in chronicle accounts, albeit contemporary ones. A more reliable source records a rebel being indicted for freeing Balle not from the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone but from the bishop of London’s prison at Bishop’s Stortford. Since this was on 11 June, and the rebels were on Blackheath on the afternoon ...”

“... Sand Water muscling to shore at twilight, Muscling over her ribs, the water so warm For September. Thomas Paine said, We just couldn’t stay boys (regarding the colonists) Or something to that effect. Ladybugs gather, covering a pear, Gulls screech about the deserted lighthouse. How agreeable to discover Someone loves you, or even later, That you’ve become a fixture In someone’s stable of influences ...”

“... without fanfare. As yet, few have picked up on an analysis by the New York University economist Thomas Philippon of the history of the unit cost of financial intermediation. The unit cost is a measure of the efficiency of the financial system, and Philippon tracks its level in the United States since 1884, the time of pens and paper ledgers, when a ...”

“... or, if seen as half-horse, hooves, not feet, gelatinous from jigging on that heat, and they dance more featly, fleeter, faster because their dancefloor’s on the site of a disaster. Does their acrobatic goat/horse/man gavotte come from the ground they jig on being hot? All I’m suggesting is we might enquire if the dancing is dependent on the ...”

“... His notice in the Victorian DNB was a scant 700 words; in the new DNB it has ballooned to more than 8000. Now he has been canonised by the publication of an Oxford edition of his complete works, the second complete works in a century, more than have been accorded either Hobbes or Locke. The story of Winstanley’s ...”

“... At one point in Thomas Peacock’s satire Melincourt, the heroine Anthelia offers a spirited sketch of the character traits which she looks for in a prospective husband. ‘I would require him to be free in all his thoughts, true in all his words, generous in all his actions – ardent in friendship, enthusiastic in love, disinterested in both … the champion of the feeble, the firm opponent of the powerful oppressor – not to be enervated by luxury, nor corrupted by avarice, nor intimidated by tyranny, nor enthralled by superstition – more desirous to distribute wealth than to possess it, to disseminate liberty than to appropriate power, to cheer the heart of sorrow than to dazzle the eyes of folly ...”

“... without falling prey to a barbarous irrationalism? It is a problem that haunts the pages of Thomas Mann – another refugee from Hitler – for whose Doctor Faustus Adorno acted as musicological adviser. In fact, Modernism in general is shot through with a desire for some solid truth while at the same time mourning its elusiveness. Modernist culture of ...”

“... she can’t have been unaware that this is exactly how drugs are smuggled into prison. Merrilyn Thomas’s book concerns the work of Clive Stafford-Smith and the Southern Prisoners Defence Committee. Born in Newmarket, educated at Radley and another Cambridge reject, Stafford-Smith went on a scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel ...”

“... was a flourishing Anglo-Saxon kingdom, met its end on 30 January 1540, one of the last of the more than eight hundred English religious houses closed over the previous decade and a half. The final day of monastic life at Evesham witnessed the standard process of surrender by which Henry VIII’s government took possession of these ancient and supposedly ...”

“... with a bottle of champagne, they barely knew who was replacing him. The Japanese leadership was more circumspect: their intelligence indicated that they were even less likely to get a conditional peace from Truman than they were from Roosevelt. Churchill thought Truman might be more malleable than FDR, while Stalin took a ...”

“... It seems to me that nothing approaching the truth has yet been said on this subject,’ Thomas Nagel says in the middle of this complex, wide-ranging and very interesting book; and he says it at the end of a chapter (on the freedom of the will) not, as some other philosophers might, at the beginning. The book argues in a determined way about the largest philosophical questions: the nature of reality, the possibility of knowledge, freedom, morality, the meaning of life ...”

“... basket in the bulrushes, the parting of the Red Sea – all recur insistently, though Esther is more troubled by the image of ‘the Hebrews leaving Egypt, Pharaoh’s army at their heels’, which she thinks will be the islanders’ fate (‘Pharaoh will come after us, like he always does’). Before Paradise is lost, a sinuous rhythm evokes Apple ...”

“... we knew his story as we knew the life of Nelson or St George. There was no such moving image for Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog (or Rottweiler) as there is not for Nelson’s Hardy or St George’s horse; the acts of the chief apostle are not celebrated. We know Huxley as a photograph or a cartoon: heavy-jawed and self-confident, or already fixed in ...”