“... book – written by dictation in the 1430s and often described as the first autobiography in English – as a powerful assertion of her self in the world. The self Margery describes is different from our modern understanding of that word, however, and not only because she appears, with perhaps feigned humility, as a mere ‘creature’. As Barbara Newman ...”

“... But above all it is an account of how Ali – who, like comrades such as Perry Anderson, Richard Gott and Robin Blackburn, is now in his eighties – has sustained a particular kind of political life, which younger leftists are unlikely to be able to enjoy.Ali’s first volume of memoirs, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, was ...”

“... to attend its weekly lectures. Such amateur societies were the main forum for the study of English poetry (the academic discipline of literature still confined itself to the ancient Greeks and Romans). But it also provided its members with something else: a chance to own reprints of Shelley’s more obscure and early writings.Wise took charge of ...”

“... Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in those who would interpret ...”

“... Of all the great English poets, Dryden must be the least enjoyed. Once honoured ‘rather in the stiffness than in the strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away among the heroes’, according to Mark Van Doren, the critic who is still, nearly a century on, the most persuasive of his would-be resurrectors ...”

“... a vote censuring the Chamberlain government for its failure to supply British troops in Norway. As Richard Davenport-Hines records, the minister of health spat on Profumo’s shoe after he passed through the lobbies. The Tory chief whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’. Even for a headstrong young man it was a remarkably ...”

“... of Cornish design and granite sold in various sizes by large department stores.’There was no English or imperial tradition of monumental memorials, no exemplars such as von Klenze’s Walhalla high above the Danube. There was no Arc de Triomphe, no Lincoln Memorial. Calton Hill possesses a hallucinatory grandeur, but Scotland was not a model for the War ...”

“... The author of ‘Naming of Parts’, probably the most anthologised English poem of the Second War, has too often been held to be that and that only. Like Julian Grenfell, author of ‘Into Battle’, he is seen as the saddest freak of the literary fairground: the one-poem poet. The publication of his collected poems will give the lie to that gross misperception ...”

“... the work. And she explores this with as much questing and well-furnished unobtrusive cleverness as Richard Sewall brought to his two-volume life of Emily Dickinson – another ‘dotty spinster’, who wrote of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her ...”

“... In his early twenties he published what is probably to this day the most widely read work of English philosophy, Language, Truth and Logic (1936), and followed it with The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940). Late in life he doubted whether much of Language, Truth and Logic was right, and complained that students are required to read it primarily ...”

“... War was to some extent (an extent he characteristically exaggerated) inspired and fashioned by the English captain’s writings. Heinz Guderian and others subsequently proclaimed themselves his disciples. Here was fame indeed, though of an unusual kind. Ideas about the proper use of tanks were not by any means Liddell Hart’s only contribution to the study of ...”

“... reformers. A recent impressive book by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village,* suggested that Calvinist theology became especially acceptable to parish élites, the minority who were prospering in the great economic divide of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, as against the mass of the poor who were subsiding into ...”

“... make Pound extraordinary not the least is that he is a great writer – the only one writing in English – who lived through and recorded what it felt like to be defeated in the Second World War. I concentrate for the moment on The Pisan Cantos because that seems to me, as it does to Anthony Woodward, Pound’s ‘greatest achievement’. Everything that ...”

“... results. We are invited to understand pre-war Germany and its culture through the figure of Richard Strauss. In Strauss’s tone-poems and operas, Tuchman finds traces of the German sickness, which takes the form of morbidity, vulgarity and arrogance; and she says of the dissonances in Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica: ‘If this is German home ...”

“... Angela Carter as the wolf-infested forest of Germanic folklore – or, for that matter, as a wet English wood. Another overture – ‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ – puts on record the thoughts of the Changeling, that bone of contention between Oberon and Titania, here dubbed ‘the Golden Herm’, short for ...”