“... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...”

“... he reveals his name, and even this arch literary empiricist curiously insists that his first name, Thomas (rather than his surname), is the real sign that he is a person of no nonsense: ‘You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all ...”

“... to discussion of the revolution.Further west, in Princeton, or much further, in Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann and his family spent diverting evenings – this in 1939 – debating which of Zweig, Ludwig, Feuchtwanger and Remarque was the worst writer. Emil Ludwig himself, in an obituary, wrote that none of Zweig’s writings had affected him in a way that ...”

“... there was. We owe the widespread belief that Robin lived in the time of Richard I (1157-1199) to William Stukeley (1687-1765), an eccentric scholar of ancient British history who fabricated for him a crazy family pedigree going back to the Normans. Knight argues that the search for the historical Robin is as quixotic as the search for the historical ...”

“... ideological lineage going back to the Republican Party of the 1790s, a radical organisation led by Thomas Jefferson. The first party system gave way around 1830 to the battles of the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. The emergence of today’s Republican Party during the 1850s as an open adversary of Southern ‘Slave Power’ and the advent of the Civil War ...”

“... either the metaphysical disjunctions of post-Eliot Modernists or the cascading syllables of Dylan Thomas’s New Romanticism, but Movement writers such as Larkin were allergic to the whiff of self-importance they detected in poets at ease on public platforms. When Day-Lewis’s final Collected Poems was published in 1954, it met with a muted reception. George ...”

“... the mid-1730s lobbied theatre managements to stage more Shakespeare; she had also encouraged Sir Thomas Hanmer, a former Speaker of the House of Commons, to prepare the Oxford edition of Shakespeare published in 1744, with a picture of the Westminster Abbey statue as a frontispiece. Nor were her artistic interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the ...”

“... clear how the figure was powered, but according to an account by the 16th-century antiquarian William Lambarde it was able to ‘bow down and lifte up it selfe, to shake and stirre the handes and feete, to nod the head, to rolle the eies, to wag the chaps, to bende the browes’.How did medieval and early modern audiences perceive such creations? Todd and ...”

“... system that had once been popular with students and sermon note-takers, and was later used by Thomas Jefferson. Pepys had included a tachygraphy manual in the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, and Tomalin concludes that poor Smith ‘carried out the entire task without knowing that the key to the shorthand was in the library’. Loveman’s careful analysis of the ...”

“... seruants place and dutie’ was acknowledged to be ‘of more abiect and inferiour kinde’, as William Gouge put it in Of Domesticall Duties (1622). By the mid-20th century, the material conditions of service had changed beyond recognition, yet the ideological assumptions that had governed the early modern household continued to colour the language and ...”

“... it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being ...”

“... by Irish Dynamiters.’Eighteen months earlier, a young Irishman recently returned from America, Thomas J. Clarke, one of O’Donovan Rossa’s Sancho Panzas, had been arrested in London. Using evidence of an elaborate bomb factory in Birmingham, the Crown charged him and other followers of O’Donovan Rossa with treason. (The plan, it seems, had been to ...”

“... the poem are all the more fully revealed if it is seen in relation to another mysterious lyric by Thomas Hardy which also exposes us to a sort of hallucinatory experience: One without looks in tonight   Through the curtain-chink From the sheet of glistening white; One without looks in tonight   As we sit and think   By the fender-brink. We do not ...”

“... assumptions about the role of rape in our culture. Both present America in a state of crisis. William Kennedy Smith, Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas are just the tip of the iceberg; the statistics are horrific. Rape is increasing four times faster than any other crime. Anywhere from 20 to 44 per cent of girls in their ...”

“... to one item, it will be gratified by the next. Thus, in the Sinclair-Stevenson list, the admirable William Scammell (Five Easy Pieces) has to rub shoulders with poets whose every move shrieks its discordance with his. The Carcanet list that houses Patricia Beer is a good deal more harmonious; but it features John Ashbery, of whom one has to say that if he is ...”