“... the author’s identity, the author’s credentials, the date, the very words on the page – may be corrupted,’ and that, as a result, we should ‘proceed with extreme caution’. Wahrman is certainly right that cheap print was a chaos of variants: but that is precisely the problem with his thesis. Such ‘slips’ were everywhere. According to Early ...”

“... illegal) bombing of Laos. Le Duan either didn’t get Nixon’s message or was unimpressed. What may have had more effect was Nixon’s announced intention to reduce progressively the number of US forces in South Vietnam by arming the South Vietnamese, a programme grandly styled ‘Vietnamisation’ but chiefly designed ‘to placate public opinion at ...”

“... play in structuring American society – while at the same time reminding us that those beliefs may be rational but they’re not true. As Tzvetan Todorov pointed out a long time ago, the fact that some women were once thought of as witches and sometimes burned as witches did not make them witches, even socially constructed ones, and the conceptual ...”

“... the gardens – reminded visitors of Covent Garden, or even St Mark’s Square. Garden buildings may be ephemeral, but with tens of thousands of visitors each season the orchestra building, the rotunda and the pillared saloon were some of the best-known examples of modern architecture in the country. Vauxhall became a showroom for British architecture and ...”

“... On 11 May 1831, a fastidious 25-year-old Norman aristocrat arrived in New York City with an assignment to report on American prisons for the French Ministry of Justice. Over the next nine months he travelled up the East Coast, down the Mississippi and through what was then the wild west of Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan ...”

“... undergoes an expiatory death and resurrection. As Collins observes, the Teacher of Righteousness may be associated, like Jesus, with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, although the teacher ‘is not said to offer his life as ransom for many, or to suffer vicariously on their behalf’, and there is scant evidence that he was predicted to rise from the ...”

“... on the dangers of reading to women, Nymphomania, or a Treatise on Uterine Frenzy. Conspiracy may not be quite the right word, but no doubt there are some foundational inequities in written culture. Despite all the encouraging fathers and teachers and husbands there have ever been, Moderata isn’t being immoderate when she writes about ‘envy and ill ...”

“... along the way, the blisters, or having to rise early in the morning. (The modern reader may not feel much sympathy, for the servants do all the work and she is hardly over-burdened with responsibilities.) She is short with her fellow travellers and refuses the mount that has been allotted to her. Along with Nicolson, whose attire suggests he’s out ...”

“... much like our own, Shapiro quotes the sonneteer Giles Fletcher, who wrote in 1593 that ‘A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none.’ ‘If Giles Fletcher could compose sonnets to “try” his “humour”,’ Shapiro says, ‘Shakespeare could have done so too.’ True, and ...”

“... justifies slavery in general; the second specifies who should be enslaved. Aristotle’s argument may be taken as paradigmatic: slavery is a natural condition of human society, but only some people are born slaves. The first proposition – that slavery is justified in the abstract – comes in several familiar forms: slavery, it’s said, was ordained by the ...”

“... and gladiatorial contests, but there is little chance of the same happening here. In practice, one may be sure, it will be the new elite who will flock to the games in their Mercs and BMWs. It is quite common in South Africa for higher civil servants or mayors and councillors from poor areas to award themselves trips to the Olympics or other such international ...”

“... Counts: Essays on the Writer’s Desk. (In it, there’s a chapter on Proust.) I also had, as you may have inferred, a thing for Isherwood – as a writer – in particular. (‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,’ Goodbye to Berlin begins. ‘Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the ...”

“... characterises the almost cardiographic outpouring triggered by an exchange of letters. ‘How well may this writing Daily & to the moment, shew my beloved Susan and my Fredy [her sister Susanna and a friend, Frederica Lock] the present freedom of my Mind from agitation,’ she writes in an early passage. Later she speaks of offering ‘a window to my ...”

“... to the rich (top 20 per cent) and economic growth … the benefits do not trickle down.’ Last May, the OECD published a study entitled In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All. All this makes it possible for us to talk about equality not only in terms of fairness, but also as the means to prosperity. The UK is deeply unequal and has an ...”

“... A man may find Naples or Palermo merely pretty,’ James Elroy Flecker, one-time British vice-consul in Beirut, wrote in October 1914, ‘but the deeper violet, the splendour and desolation of the Levant waters, is something that drives into the soul.’ A month later, Russia, Britain and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in response to the Turkish fleet’s foolhardy bombardment of Odessa and Sevastopol ...”