“... Martin writes Michele’s, Rose writes Irvine’s, Colm writes Antonia’s, Ian writes Iain’s, Henry writes George’s (no, they’re dead). Or perhaps they did. And maybe Naim Attallah wrote Ghosting by Jennie Erdal. And perhaps we don’t need to know, or want to care.The great service that both Attallah and Erdal have done us, though, is to have ...”

“... An adequately supported project may fail, but an overlooked one will not succeed. According to the Thomas Theorem popularised by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an attack on ...”

“... this description of the singing in the Chapel Royal in 1515, written by the Venetian ambassador to Henry VIII’s court and included in Andrew Parrott’s The Pursuit of Musick? ‘More divine than human; they were not singing but jubilating [giubilavano].’ The exact meaning of ‘giubilavano’ has been long debated, to no avail. Or what does this résumé ...”

“... urban labourers or his opposition to American imperialism.)Until recently, Democrats celebrated Thomas Jefferson as the party’s founder, though the author of the Declaration of Independence has fallen into disfavour because of his ownership of slaves. But as Kazin makes clear, the party of the early republic that elected Jefferson to two terms as ...”

“... figure whose ideas shaped the politics of Asian exclusion was the American political economist Henry George, a firm critic of monopoly capital. (Ironically, his work later inspired Sun Yat-sen, the first leader of the Kuomintang.) In 1869 he published an essay on ‘The Chinese in California’. The split between labour and capital, George wrote, was a ...”

“... Donne’s family​ were devout and prominent Roman Catholics, related on his mother’s side to Thomas More. Two uncles became Jesuit priests; one of them, Jasper Heywood, was briefly the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. In 1593 Donne’s brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a priest, and died of the plague ...”

“... five early adopters of synth/beat-box tech I personally called to mind weren’t so pale: Timmy Thomas, Shuggie Otis, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Lee Perry.)But Schütte isn’t finished yet. Kraftwerk’s influence, it seems, also determined every molecule of 1980s electro-pop. They ‘set the blueprint for all later bands and musicians working in the area ...”

“... a plucked fowl, but had no thought of being misunderstood.Today’s barber is my partner, Rupert Thomas, who, while professing to admire my abundant locks, manages to make me look like a blond Hitler. He was also wondering if he could save the offcuts in case they might find a market on eBay.2 March. I’ve written somewhere of one of Dad’s ...”

“... Rutherford’s gathering of previously unpublished or uncollected early poems, and Professor Thomas Pinney’s selection from the early journalism: special reports, feature articles, social notes, reviews and comic sketches written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette between 1884 and 1888. Both editors acknowledge the rawness of the work they have ...”

“... own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his childhood ...”

“... pompous, but I recognised Brooke’s talent at once, and remarked that the epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne – ‘Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and Some Falsehoods almost Truths’ – contains ‘in a sense justification of all novel-writing’. I knew nothing of Jocelyn Brooke himself, except what was to be gathered from this book. He was, in ...”

“... like other self-creating poets, had to invent a persona – that of ‘Anne Bradstreet’, or ‘Henry Pussycat’ – in order to become his real self set down in words. Lowell had no need for that: his self and his persona were both absolute Lowell. Yet he did share with his peers the general characteristics stated by Auden to be typical of American poets ...”

“... As the (again, literally) middle-man Mr W.H. and the publisher T.T. (whom we know to be Thomas Thorpe) render back to the poet ‘that eternity promised by our ever-living poet’ himself, so do the inscriptional lineation and syntax work to involve the three men in a three-in-one, one-in-three pattern of mutual good. The dedicatory inscription ...”

“... will all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil ...”

“... tea-cup opensA lane to the land of the dead.These vistas owe something to Auden’s first love, Thomas Hardy, and especially to what he described as Hardy’s way of ‘looking at life from a very great height’, his willingness ‘to see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history, life on ...”