“... dealing with how an encounter of this kind ought to be conducted, taking us through a Middle English poem called The Gast of Gy (‘The Ghost of Guy’), in which a dead husband comes to his wife’s bedroom to haunt her – his own pains are largely unrelieved, but he induces in her a terrified anticipation of her penance for a sin against nature they ...”

“... climax of Browning’s strangest poem, a horn-player greets his fate undaunted by Death or Middle English Philology. Weary of questing and pestered by visions, Childe Roland reaches the Dark Tower with the names of fallen comrades ringing in his ears. The hills encircle him like sprawling giants. His death seems certain ...”

“... as an adjective for his music. Indeed, one of the endearing and perhaps enduring qualities of the English composers whose names have registered on the public since 1900 – Elgar, Walton, Britten, Tippett – is their essential conservatism – their instinctive preference for working with the grain rather than against it, notably in their respect for the ...”

“... Fréa gave up a job in publishing to protest at Fairmile. Dale gave up nursing and Richard gave up managing a mental health phone-line. Many sign on, but many others choose not to. Going against the grain of consumerism, these renunciants have discovered that there can be power in poverty. At the Rio Earth Summit, a US delegate warned that ...”

“... Their friendship continued, with some alarming contact with a blood-and-nation group called the English Mistery and the offer by an emissary of the Duke of Devonshire of the safe Tory seat of Eastbourne, until the Hoare-Laval Pact sent John off to the left. He went to the House of Commons to tell Nancy of his defection. ‘She was sure,’ he says, ‘I ...”

“... These five books represent something of a cross-section of current work on Tudor and Stuart English history, and they give a picture of how fundamentally the agenda for discussion in this field has changed over the past twenty-five years. Yet the point they mark in the development of the subject is not a total revolution: it is a sort of historiographical 1654, a mood in which the interesting question is seen to be, not whether the new approaches are valid, but how much of the old may be seen to have survived their onslaught ...”

“... the fact that nearly two-thirds of those who consulted the 17th-century astrological physician Richard Napier for treatment of their mopish or melancholic moods were women, one must set the observation that, as best one can judge from the admittedly defective data, men greatly outnumbered women among the inmates of 18th and early 19th-century madhouses. It ...”

“... 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him’.In 1934, a year before his death, Pessoa began a ...”

“... the history of New England while seeming to embrace it. It seeks to draw visitors into a cocoon of English colonial history, memorialising the arrival and settlement in 1639 of a band of Puritans under the leadership of the Reverend Henry Whitfield. State and local authorities have legislated for the preservation of numerous buildings, four districts and the ...”

“... and he is especially well versed in the debates surrounding the causes and character of the English Civil War – for so long one of the consuming preoccupations of both professional historiography and national self-definition. What’s more, his research has been assiduous not just in the sources (many of them unpublished) bearing directly on Hill’s ...”

“... I did with Nicholas Hytner, the ‘shocking’ revelation that I don’t read much contemporary English fiction and all the tired old stuff about treason that I’ve been saying since 1988 and A Question of Attribution. ‘It’s great,’ says Daniel (who’s off to Cuba next week), ‘that you can still piss people off however old you are.’18 May. Once ...”

“... the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to? Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first ...”

“... lies an important earlier collection, the work published in 1972, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, as Household and Family in Past Time. This book established the remarkable constancy of average household size in England since the 16th century, despite people’s mobility, with a norm of a little under five persons until the low birth rate and ...”

“... alone to Massachusetts, ignoring X’s objections, to take up a job in a small college’s English department. More recently, he has started visiting a palm reader: ‘Where else, on a windy day in January, can you drive out beset by blue devils and in five minutes be semi-reliably assured by a relative stranger that you are who you think you are, and ...”

“... brilliant biography, Saint Louis, came out in French in 1996, and is now published in a readable English translation (despite gaucheries, like the retention of the French forms of names: ‘Giraud de Galles’ for ‘Gerald of Wales’, ‘Compostelle’ for ‘Compostela’ and many more). Its publication gives Anglophones a book to set beside ...”