“... in a riot of onomatopoeia when the song was performed as a round. Harris introduces us to William Merle, who between 1337 and 1344 kept a diary of the weather at Driby in Lincolnshire, one of the earliest such records to survive, and to Sir Gawain watching the seasons turn in the anxious year between his first meeting with the Green Knight and the ...”

“... equestrian dash. The three figures about whom Stubbs has most to say, the poets Sir John Suckling, Thomas Carew and William Davenant, do to varying degrees answer to that description. Though his book makes no claims to archival discovery, it lights up their writing and brings fresh perception to the ties of friendship ...”

“... to fight for the Jacobites and be executed for treason. Not that the ICS was a much safer choice: William Wedderburn joined it in 1860 shortly after his brother and sister-in-law and their child had been killed in the Mutiny. Later in his career he responded to another Scottish ‘calling’, joining the band of radical civil servants who supported Indian ...”

“... by three botanists, each supposedly stumbling on it independently. In 1906, William Bateson, the most forceful champion of Mendel’s work in Britain, dubbed the new science ‘genetics’. Those 34 years of obscurity have fascinated historians of science. Why was such a major advance overlooked for so long? That Mendel published in ...”

“... an Ibsen campaign was started by an unlikely pair, George Bernard Shaw and the aspiring writer William Archer, who also became Ibsen’s first English translator. Shaw’s pamphlet, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, makes Ibsen into a Norwegian Shaw, intent on shocking Britain out of its Victorian wits. Shaw liked best about Ibsen what others abhorred – his ...”

“... reader, much affected by a series of iconoclastic texts she encountered early in life, including Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and William Godwin’s Political Justice. She favoured the rights of women (perhaps as a result of reading Mary Wollstonecraft), and briefly attempted to found a Godwinian commonwealth with ...”

“... socks, Woodbines – the mood is ominous. The poem ends with a reference to the death of Edward Thomas. Lewis himself was killed in 1944.Sarah Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a ...”

“... assumption: that enormous power and influence was wielded first by Cardinal Wolsey, and then by Thomas Cromwell, leaving Henry as a kind of wilful but malleable presence in the background of the political process, riding out to hunt or joust while, in darkened rooms, factional rivalries decided policy. This view – too reliant on the self-congratulatory ...”

“... There are other philosophers who would have served her purpose better – Hume and Sartre and William James, analysts of reason and the passions of a psychological subtlety beyond Smith’s pretensions. Those names will not make the rats perk up in quite the way Adam Smith does. She addresses obliquely a single contemporary opponent in matters of law and ...”

“... undefined and undefinable beneath them’. This is apparent in the poems he wrote while living on Thomas, Lord Fairfax’s estate in Yorkshire, where he was appointed tutor to Fairfax’s daughter Mary some time after Fairfax resigned as Commander-in-Chief – or Lord General – of the Parliamentary forces. Fairfax resigned because he did not want to take ...”

“... in his model of decency and upstandingness. Even if he doesn’t mind a Marxist scholar such as Thomas Hodgkin (in fact, he loved Hodgkin and supplies a strong, sympathetic portrait), contradiction is by and large a failing, hard to distinguish from dishonesty, or moral blindness. What drives this failing? Mostly high-mindedness; a wish for the world to be ...”

“... is the Wilcote chapel, a fan-vaulted two-bayed chantry of exquisite perfection. In it lies Sir William Wilcote, MP for Oxfordshire under Richard II and Henry IV, who died in 1411. He is shown in alabaster armour, with a collar of SS (the Lancastrian badge), his eagle coat of arms on his jupon and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich ...”

“... was somehow the cause of the war.’Neiman mentions the so-called Dunning School, named after William Dunning, a professor at Columbia at the turn of the 20th century, who, with his followers, disparaged the efforts made during the Reconstruction to establish the civil and economic rights (forty acres and a mule) of former slaves and gave intellectual ...”

“... salutary way from that of the judge who in 1797 directed the jury trying Tom Paine’s publisher, Thomas Williams, for blasphemy that the Christian religion was part of the law of England. In these and endless other ways, the UK’s constitution changes constantly, blown by winds of which the actors are barely aware. Who today would like to be heard saying ...”

“... 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 ...”