“... at the beginning of the century. Partly, this may be explained in the words once written by Keith Thomas: ‘if magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognise that no society will ever be free from it.’ Democratic politicians have eyes bigger than their ...”

“... Britain’s real place in the post-war and post-imperial world. When in 1944 the American writer William Fox first put into circulation the term ‘super-power’ – in a book entitled The Super-Powers: The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union – Their Responsibility for Peace – Britain counted as one of the three. Even then the label did not ...”

“... on his own work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to ...”

“... including in the last chapter reproductions of topographical drawings done in the last century by William Henry Holmes and Turner’s supposed student, Thomas Moran. They may be faulted on minutiae of physical detail, but Holmes’s sense of the material structure of the Canyon is uncanny, and Moran, had he been reproduced ...”

“... Church, but the claim would be more persuasive did not the teaching vary so greatly. The Gospel of Thomas, probably composed about the middle of the century, consists of short sayings and parables of Jesus, some of them derived from, or at any rate parallel to, those known from the New Testament, others hitherto unknown and including a few which may well be ...”

“... view of life, where action is more important than reaction; and Cohen may also be right that Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigms (syndromes of scientific assumptions, described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962) does not apply neatly to the Behaviourism revolution, or to psychology as a whole. Kuhn would classify psychology as not being ...”

“... word) of the ‘conversion’ which she was determined to bring about. She admitted that William Fanshaw and other friends thought Rochester mad, but she reported firmly on what he thought in his lucid moments when they were absent. Mr Treglown quotes with effect a letter from the great Marquis of Halifax to Burnet, exactly a month after ...”

“... platitudes, a civil servant mangling a story, a mime of minimal narrative competence which makes Thomas Mann’s bumbling Zeitblom look like Nabokov. ‘Insofar as the cliché can be used without irony,’ we read a little earlier, ‘he had become a respected literary voice.’ A cliché can’t be used without irony unless you forget it’s a cliché, and ...”

“... the appropriation of Auschwitz (including Höss himself) by a thick, mainstream American novel, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: this actually has some reality about it, because it’s pretty sure in its own conventions, corny as these are. Sophie is a dazzlingly beautiful survivor of Auschwitz, and while the pathos of her past is revealed in extended ...”

“... begins, least lightly. His first paragraph is a model: No conquest is free of catastrophe. Duke William came and took what he wanted. And of course there were those who got hurt. But obvious though that is, revisionist historians today dwell less on the changes imposed by the Normans than on what they were content to leave alone. That is not the way it ...”

“... local families – was rapidly replaced by an international economy of paper credit.In his Utopia, Thomas More is introduced to the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus on the docks at Antwerp. But the utopian tradition in the Low Countries, centred on luilekkerland (‘lazy-delicious-land’), was meatier, and more Antwerpian. In one luilekkerland story written in ...”

“... know how to think straight – and Donoghue does get Davie curiously wrong when he classes Thomas Hardy and British Poetry with Larkin’s Oxford Book of 20th-Century English Verse as arguing that ‘the Modernism of Eliot and Pound was a false trail,’ when this was precisely the basis on which Davie attacked Larkin. Where Eliot was ...”

“... England there was nothing. The absence of English Scriptures helps explain the great impact that William Tyndale’s English translations, first of the New Testament and then of substantial parts of the Old, had on the country in the 1520s and 1530s. His New Testaments, printed on the Continent, were bought up by the Bishop of London, who had them burned in ...”

“... more interesting – than you are. Anglophilia showed itself in the magazine’s politics (Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Harold Ross describes him praying for Britain before America’s entry into the war) and its choice of subjects and contributors. Edmund Wilson, reviewing one of Taylor’s novels, adduced it as ‘one more proof that the English ...”

“... to the Vaughan affair, and here there’s an intriguing bridge between fact and fiction. In Thomas Hughes’s autobiographical novel, Tom Brown’s affection for the beautiful Arthur sets him wondering whether Arthur has a sister he might marry. In real life ‘Arthur’ was Arthur Stanley (ultimately dean of Westminster), and his sister Catherine ...”