“... about Shippey’s book is the sympathy he brings to the Medieval literature upon which Tolkien drew, mounting to a brisk enthusiasm when, for example, Shippey explains how Tolkien reworked features of Old English poetry to spell out to modern readers things that an Anglo-Saxon would have known instinctively. But what is depressing about The Road to ...”

“... noted how fertile a metaphor computers provided for the autistic. The concept of circuitry, which drew on cybernetics and brain science, suggested an almost infinite malleability, and therefore an almost infinite inclusiveness. Judy Singer, an Australian sociologist, came up with the term ‘neurodiversity’, which was soon adopted as the watchword of the ...”

“... to imagine ways of organising care beyond the family unit. In the 19th century, Charles Fourier drew up blueprints for ‘phalansteries’, self-contained communities of around a thousand people who would undertake all the necessary tasks (children would be looked after in the ‘noisy area’, next to the carpenters and blacksmiths). Jane Sophia Appleton ...”

“... preaching, his opposition to the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, the enormous crowds he drew, and for his prose style. This ‘poor unschooled tinker’ became, Paisley argued, ‘the most prominent man of letters . . . as far as English literature is concerned’. He had ‘the tinker’s power of reaching the heart’. ‘Prick him ...”

“... needs more explicit testimony than even these powerful images provide. It is obvious from Warren Smith’s marathon retelling of the tangled tale of Tibet and its longstanding relationship with China that things may be yet more complex than his seven hundred pages allow for, since he reads neither Chinese nor Tibetan, and depends for the most part on the ...”

“... and (even more ludicrously) is endowed with a romantic yearning for Mr Knightley worthy of Harriet Smith herself. A line in feminist literary criticism takes Jane Fairfax, along with Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility, as an exemplary figure of the repressions and suppressions which Austen’s art both questions and practises. But of this struggle ...”

“... Rennie’s Far-Fetched Facts. It takes him down awell-worn and, as he seesit, narrow path. Bernard Smith showed the way in two magnificent books, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850 (1960) and Imagining the Pacific (1992) – from some oversight they do not appear in Rennie’s bibliography. Smith demonstrated ...”

“... that have been made, though useful, have been limited in scope and achievement. J. Jean Hecht drew heavily on printed manuals, memoirs and correspondence and focused on servants in atypical great houses; Bridget Hill set out to broaden our understanding of service in smaller households, but also relied heavily on printed sources. Tim Meldrum’s ...”

“... in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins ...”

“... 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the ...”

“... so far wrong. Christ appeared to Catherine in a dream, and as a reward for subduing her nature, drew her mouth to the wound in his side and let her drink to her heart’s content. We may or may not, down the generations and across belief systems, consider this behaviour holy, but would anyone deny that it is disgusting? Mind you, relativism dies hard: there ...”

“... London meanwhile needed a Burma policy. During their wartime exile in Simla, Reginald Dorman-Smith, the governor before the British retreat in 1942, and his colleagues drew up what became a White Paper for the reconstruction of the Burmese economy and a gradual transition to home rule. A representative executive ...”

“... The winter of 1607-08 was extraordinarily bad, even by the standards of the age. Captain John Smith, Jamestown’s leader in waiting, wrote of ‘extreame sharpe’ weather, which caused the James River, as broad as it was brackish, to freeze almost completely; many European rivers, as far south as Greece, did the same. The Thames became a ‘frost ...”

“... her friends and family much bother. She was also a publisher’s nightmare: the genial George Smith ruefully recalled that her manuscripts were ‘a medley of pieces of paper of all shapes and sizes, written here and there and fastened together with a needle and thread’. These disorderly ways were the product of a conviction that she need not distract ...”

“... brother, Giuliano, in 1475. An elegantly eclectic poet in both Latin and Italian, Poliziano drew his images of goddesses and nymphs from the Greek and Latin poetic texts he later taught in the Florentine Studio or university. Like Botticelli, he combined his borrowings in new ways. And he described figures in motion – and the fluttering clothing and ...”