“... called them in 1814) all made the same move, whether from conviction, pragmatism, or both. Robert Southey, whose incendiary drama Wat Tyler (1794) had been too hot for even the most reckless publisher to touch at the height of the revolution panic, was now cheerfully knocking out loyal odes in his role as poet laureate. Southey was consistent, as ...”

“... that some of the first and fiercest episodes in the Indian Mutiny played themselves out. On 11 May, rebelling sepoys of the Bengal Army crossed the River Jumna and called on the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah to serve as their protector. Next, they turned their attention to the British civilians who clustered in the area around the church, slaughtering the ...”

“... a deadly activity. It literally killed, or was believed to, which sometimes had the same result. Robert Elliott’s classic study of The Power of Satire tells us that poems were used as weapons of war in pre-Islamic Arabia, and it is not only there, or in the curses of primitive tribesmen remote from our literary tradition, that this ‘power’ showed ...”

“... to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new dispensation. How it was that they ...”

“... and the names of banned writers listed (739 Jewish writers who wrote in French were included by May 1943). Some publishing houses were requisitioned (including Hachette), others were closed, while some newspaper editors were dismissed (Jean Prouvost of Paris-Soir was one). Other periodicals met with German approval and were given preferential treatment or ...”

“... a Mutual Suicide Association, by the regulations whereof any member being weary of life, may call at any time upon another to cut his throat for him. It is all of course to be done very quietly without weeping or gnashing of teeth. I, for instance, am to go in and say, ‘I say, Hunt, just stop painting that head a minute, and cut my throat’; to ...”

“... disappeared as it has been surrounded and overlaid by successive Chinese visions of the modern. Robert Barnett’s experience of Lhasa does not go back as far as the Dalai Lama’s memory: he first visited in 1987, as a tourist on a not very profound search for enlightenment. He never got to the cave where he had planned a week of meditation. Instead, on ...”

“... rhyme, can hope to convey both their individual voices and their collective charm. It is here that Robert Kehew’s anthology, Lark in the Morning, succeeds so brilliantly. Kehew’s bilingual edition includes 28 poets and 55 songs, extending from the ‘First Troubadour’, Guillem de Peiteus (1071-1127, but see the cautions above), to the last, Guiraut ...”

“... for angling as ‘idle time not idly spent’ and his dictum that ‘he would rather live five May months than forty Decembers.’Carol Chillington Rutter’s Lying Abroad opens with an aqueous image. Staring ‘down into the waters of a Venetian canal’, the author imagines a watery Wotton floating among forgotten ignoti: ‘faces from the past who want ...”

“... so sold on the Early Victorian ethos? Interesting though unanswerable questions. What matters, it may be thought, is Browning’s audacity in denying us, in the closing verse, the full rhyme we’ve been so emphatically led to expect. Asymmetry, discontinuity – all the mileage that Modernist artists were to get from these principles is foreshadowed in this ...”

“... not generally enjoyed by today’s Muslim minorities. Two of my paternal uncles, John and Robert, were blond and blue-eyed. John, in fact, was deployed after war service to the British Mandate force in Palestine. In uniform, he went into a Jewish-owned shop, and the shopkeeper said to a customer to whom she was speaking Yiddish: ‘Just a moment while ...”

“... extreme actions that would jeopardise national order and harmony. That claim of exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a ...”

“... secrecy is that any government which reveals how its predecessors spied upon their own populace may also face some embarrassing queries as to what comparable actions it is getting up to itself today. It is, at first sight, odd that we know a great deal more about the more necessarily secret world of military and foreign intelligence. The reasons for this ...”

“... massive, and unquestionably confiscated, correspondence, a remnant of which was acquired by Sir Robert Cotton? Where are the papers of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More? Perhaps the former kept none; the latter, practising his famous discretion, very likely destroyed his in the months during which, still free, he could confidently look forward to his ...”

“... is not the first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in ...”