“... of Ragnar Lothbrok’, in the other camp ‘lay a youth who carried in his bosom the Psalms of David’. And he it was who charged up the hill next morning ‘like a wild boar’, in the words of Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi, to destroy the Viking jarls. Edward Freeman said flatly that Alfred was ‘the most perfect character in history’, more ...”

“... true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the ...”

“... And how strange it is at this late date to see the defunct Act in Restraint of Appeals held up for our admiration. Its passage, after all, was one of the scurvier episodes in parliamentary history. In those hectic ten days at the end of March 1533, Thomas Cranmer swore his weird double oath on being installed as archbishop of Canterbury: a) to be ...”

“... Aviv. The ‘handover’ to a civilian authority is to take place after presidential elections are held, but the Scaf hasn’t committed itself to a firm date: maybe next year, maybe mid-2013. ‘The people and the army are one,’ protesters chanted when the army intervened on their side in February. That slogan now seems as plausible as pouvoir à ...”

“... it turned out – for socialist deviation from nationalist purity. Some of the party’s old guard held that the cause of independence was unideological in itself, neither of the right nor of the left. Maxwell’s radical kindergarten of Marxisant republican hipsters was as welcome to the party elders – who formed another internal group, the Campaign for ...”

“... to lose a tooth at the same time. After comparing them, Billy walked over to the outdoor well and held his hand over it for a moment. ‘I dropped mine in,’ he said. Jack walked over and tossed his in too. ‘So did I,’ he told his brother. Then Billy stretched out his arm and opened his hand to reveal the tooth still in his palm. ‘I didn’t,’ he ...”

“... of the series of catalogues of major exhibitions of 18th and early 19th-century British artists held at the Tate in the last seven or eight years – George Stubbs in 1984; Manners and Morals: Hogarth and British Painting in 1987; Wright of Derby last year. None of these was quite as blandly factual as Constable, nor so studiously innocent of the desire to ...”

“... or not it is fair to run out the batsman at the bowler’s end when he thinks the ball is dead. In David Horspool’s new study of sport in Britain, the great flashpoints and turning points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness ...”

“... of the dead. Antigone was admired by the composer Mendelssohn as a Christian martyr, and has been held up to feminists as a model of ‘masculine’ initiative. But Sally Humphreys’s findings suggest that Sophocles’s audience – despite what Creon says – would not have regarded Antigone’s determination to bury her dead brother as inspired by ...”

“... Aron wanted to point out that the Hebrew language has just as many exceptions to the rule, but he held his tongue and revelled in ‘I am jum-peeng ...’ Jumping far, far out in space, halfway to infinity, and soon he was utterly absorbed and utterly alone; jum-peeng; it was like being in a glass bubble, and someone watching from the outside might think Aron ...”

“... heritage of these arguments in forgotten black authors whose works he resurrects. Beginning with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character and the Political Condition of the Coloured People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by ...”

“... tongue, which is so repugnant to those who are capable of correct, elegant and pure speech’. He held the old idiom to have ‘contributed to the rudeness of the common man’. Introducing his translation of the Bible into correct 18th-century German (which he still wrote in Hebrew script), Mendelssohn declared himself hopeful that ‘good results’ would ...”

“... the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. Tokyo Year Zero, the 2007 predecessor to David Peace’s new novel, conforms in its early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective ...”

“... we still want a vocabulary with which to capture the central and urgent importance which politics held not only for Marvell but for a host of Renaissance and 17th-century writers. More, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Greville, Milton: all those men wrote about public events; some of them wrote to influence their course; and none of them would have ...”

“... there appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the ...”