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“... What could he better: six hundred pages of other men’s flowers, offering relief from what Henry James is supposed on his death-bed to have attributed his wearing-out to – ‘the labour of discrimination’? But the recent profusion does leave room to reflect that some anthologies are better than other anthologies, and that some subjects are better suited ...”

“... the Spanish Ambassador Sarmiento’s successful protection of troublesome recusants under James I – and handles it frivolously. Finally, Mortimer Levine contrives to sink a self-evident truth – that women usually took the back seat in Tudor government – by refusing to admit that there were exceptions, such as Anne Boleyn. Anything but ...”

“... worth laying down one’s life for two brothers or four cousins. This insight was formalised by William Hamilton in Oxford in the Sixties under the name of ‘kin selection’. If seemingly self-sacrificial behaviour disproportionately benefits one’s genetic kin, it once again becomes worthwhile in narrow genetic terms. In Wilson’s hands, Hamilton’s ...”

“... of 1797 eventually granted Scotland this school of virtue and Ferguson promptly enrolled his son James (b. 1778) in the ballot as an ‘Example to my neighbour Farmers’; though ‘if College call him away I trust that money will procure a Substitute.’ Today it is the Scots alone who detect otherness in the Scottish Enlightenment, and find it ...”

“... to combine a large territory with political stability seems to have caught the attention of James Madison, who offered a parallel vision in the tenth Federalist paper, thereby fulfilling Hume’s hope that ‘in some future age, an opportunity might be afforded of reducing the theory to practice ... in some distant part of the world.’ That was not a ...”

“... Neal Bowers has published three collections of poetry and two critical books, one on the works of James Dickey and one on Theodore Roethke. For the past twenty years he has occupied a creative writing post at Iowa State University, and, until 1992, led what he describes as ‘a most uneventful life’ in the small town of Ames, Iowa. The majority of poets, he ...”

“... in the 19th, and stutters to a halt with the hanging of two Second World War collaborators, William Joyce (the despised Lord Haw-Haw, who was born in the United States, was brought up in Ireland and on the basis of long residence had acquired a British passport) and John Amery (scion of a High Tory family, who had moved to Germany after the outbreak of ...”

“... all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and door slamming on her part and implacable calm, or the appearance of it, on Albert’s. Once he locked himself ...”

“... Exhibition of 1851 encouraged Victorians to embrace material gratification without guilt than William Stanley Jevons began to warn of the imminent exhaustion of the nation’s coal supply. Drawing explicitly on Malthus, Jevons argued that the increased demand on resources from a growing population was forcing mines into deeper and more inaccessible ...”

“... socially concerned Conservatism that Margaret Thatcher destroyed and neither John Major nor William Hague has done anything to re-create. While most other believers in this brand of Toryism, not only from Heath’s generation but the next two, have slipped away, to the House of Lords and points east, this old, old man, 83 next birthday, is still ...”

“... line, however, these are mere squibs. When Samuel Ireland, unwitting dupe of his 19-year-old son William Henry, published Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare in 1795, Malone scented blood. An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Papers and Legal ...”

“... he called it ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’? Even before the age of Romantic introspection, James Boswell, crushed by an oppressive father, was much concerned about who he might be, as he stood before the mirror admonishing himself ‘Be Johnson!’ or ‘Be Paoli!’ Hume had a look for his ID, and serenely found nothing there. And half a century of ...”

“... In 1940, after she’d gained the admiration of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, and had had nearly thirty of her poems published in literary journals or book collections, Elizabeth Bishop, then 28, admitted in a letter to Moore: ‘I scarcely know why I persist at all. It is really fantastic to place so much on the fact that I have written a half-dozen phrases that I can still bear to reread without too much embarrassment ...”

“... Almost the last line of dialogue, spoken by one of the boys, is ‘Hurrah for dear old England!’ William Golding takes aim at this scenario in Lord of the Flies (1954), which ends with its schoolboy castaways (those who haven’t been speared to death or had their heads caved in with rocks) being rescued from one another by the arrival of the Royal ...”

“... go out much. Place is unimportant. It’s where you live, no more than that: a stopover. How did William Burroughs finish up in a clapboard cabin in Lawrence, Kansas, with his brood of sleek, well-fed felines? The old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second ...”