“... the decrees of one board, and that another has something called ‘Plain Texts’, but without a fuller explanation of what such dispensations might mean, and what their advantages might be, these snippets of information can be of little use to the candidate. And nowhere is there the vaguest hint that some boards also allow the study of texts outside the ...”

“... clear that in the longer, unedited version of the diaries, we can expect to encounter a much fuller and much more angry portrait of the ‘co-creater of New Labour’. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant portion of the unpublished two million odd words are devoted to the TB-GBs. They might in their way be an important historical ...”

“... Hone had also just written and published three parodies of the Book of Common Prayer: The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany and The Sinecurists’ Creed, which satirised the venality of Tory MPs willing to say, vote for and even believe whatever their ministers told them to in exchange for the sinecures and ...”

“... shows a mill being brought back into use under the eye of God the Father. Christ is emptying St John’s eagle out of a sack into a hopper to join St Matthew’s angel, St Mark’s lion, St Luke’s ox and St Paul with his sword. They are ground into the pure flour of hope, faith and love, scooped up and bagged by Erasmus the miller under the supervision of ...”

“... Libération, started in 1973 to be the ‘voice’ of the generation of May ’68, but no fuller analysis of the modern French press or of its literary connections. To get any sense of the modern literary marketplace we have to wait indeed for the New History’s brutally downputting last chapter, by Stephen Heath, who picks on Apostrophes and on ...”

“... left – Frank was both intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after ...”

“... these sexual liberators, and the romanticising of an innately revolutionary gay sensibility, as in John Rechy’s Sexual Outlaw, but he sees radical possibilities in the ‘transgressive reinscription’ of such writers as Wilde, Genet or Orton, who undermine dominant structures of gender and class even as they appropriate and mimic them. Although he makes ...”

“... fluctuations of fashion. There are echoes, here of the revisionist Ruskinian aesthetic of Peter Fuller, although Marwick adds an erotic sub-plot to ginger things up, quoting Freud: ‘There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of “beautiful” has its roots in sexual excitation and its original meaning was “sexually stimulating”.’ This adds a ...”

“... the accompanying turf wars that claim so many academic casualties. He has written biographies of John Winthrop, Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams and George Washington; political histories of the Stamp Act crisis and the causes of the American Revolution; social histories of family life in colonial New England and Virginia; intellectual histories of Puritan ...”

“... In this instance, the Bible as a book was an effective instrument of change. The Gospel of John puzzles Schniedewind, as it does most of us. ‘John’s own written work,’ he writes, ‘began by defining the true Word as a person, not a text: “In the beginning was the Word (...”

“... when we would like to know just how much inventing has been done. Did Philip Larkin really say of John Wain: ‘No advantage of birth or position or looks or talent – nothing, and look where he is now’? If I was John Wain, I would want to be sure of the exact words. According to Amis, Wain used to think of Larkin as a ...”

“... among the most learned Brexiteers. In fact, they often go much further back than 1689. Sir John Redwood, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and long-time Tory MP for Wokingham, has invoked the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533, quoting on his constituency blog (7 June 2012) its ringing claim that ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and ...”

“... the original publication in 1825 than to the present. It’s true that Wheatley delivered a much fuller text than his predecessors, omitting only ‘a few passages which cannot possibly be printed’ and at least signalising most of these gaps. But his footnotes are sketchy and often vague, his prelims do not extend beyond antiquarian jottings entitled ...”

“... talking about them. Figures familiar from other popular histories of feminism appear – Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner, Simone de Beauvoir – but also women less often eulogised as feminist foremothers: Margaret Mead and her fellow anthropologists of the 1920s, Rebecca West and the pioneers of British ‘New Feminism’, Emma ...”

“... Le Premier homme is a re-writing of the earlier book; or better, a de-writing of it, a much fuller ‘repatriation’ by which Camus hoped to write his way back across the Mediterranean Sea, and so close the divide that had opened between the fêted, hyper-articulate man in Paris and the obscure, almost wordless household in which he had been raised. Le ...”