“... a rejection of the fusionism developed at the National Review in the 1950s under the editorship of William Buckley, which ultimately saw Reagan – and Thatcher – take power by combining neoliberal capitalism with social conservatism. The ten National Conservative principles stipulate that ‘the free market cannot be absolute’ and that the Bible ‘should ...”

“... his precipitous decline year after year. (His neuro-chemistry is not accessible to biography.) William Styron gave up trying to understand his own collapse, which coincided, roughly speaking, with Levi’s last attack: ‘the very number of hypotheses is testimony to the malady’s all but impenetrable mystery.’ Levi’s death is thus both easy and ...”

“... he draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of ...”

“... The new ideology was fiercely resisted by the upholders of older pieties. In Utopia (1516), Sir Thomas More, though himself a considerable landowner, denounces the powerful magnates who ‘enclose all into pastures’ and demolish houses and entire villages to make sheep runs. ‘The rich men, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day ...”

“... for ‘cheating a Derbyshire gentleman with counters instead of silver’, and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have ...”

“... and has, rather mysteriously, been the only standard version until now, as the American translator William Weaver arrives with an excellent new rendering. Weaver’s is not merely a modern repointing of De Zoete, but a fresh imagining, which differs in important respects from its predecessor, and in almost every one improvedly (though I prefer De Zoete’s ...”

“... fomented the Phoenix Park murders of Chief Secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and Under-Secretary Thomas Burke, who had in reality been killed (on 6 May 1882) by Parnell’s bitter enemies the Invincibles. The Times in 1887 had made many other charges under the heady influence of a group of clever and unscrupulous young Irish Unionists who had captured the ...”

“... is appropriate, when not. The influences – Hopkins in ‘George Chapman – The Iliad’, Edward Thomas in ‘On Foscombe Hill’ and ‘Up There’ and possibly ‘Imitation’, Jonson in ‘We Who Praise Poets’, Whitman and possibly D.H. Lawrence in ‘Felling a Tree’ – are discernible but never for certain, because so thoroughly assimilated and ...”

“... office, the banks and the castle, and to issue a demand that George III dismiss the government of William Pitt and make peace with the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a ...”

“... the House of Representatives, the precedent evoked is that of 1800, ‘when Colonel Burr and Thomas Jefferson each received the same number of votes’. The most interesting historical figure in 1876 is Tilden, whose principled refusal to cheat the process (or work it) is viewed by Schuyler with equal measures of respect and impatience. Tilden is one of ...”

“... other casualties’, in her gloomy list. Anne Jessop Beechey, the second wife of the portraitist William Beechey, began to show miniatures a year into their marriage in 1795. ‘She proposed it as a resource in case of any accident happening to him,’ Farington reported in his diary. ‘They have Six children.’ The painter Amelia Noel, soliciting ...”

“... of Renaissance art, as in the friendship portraits exchanged by humanists such as Erasmus and Thomas More. Panofsky underscored artistic amity for political reasons as well. A German Jew who left for the United States in 1931, he saw art as central to ‘the civilising process’ (to borrow a phrase from Norbert Elias, another German Jew in exile). For ...”

“... to Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from ...”

“... with his attack on Keats. Keats himself was enchanted by Hazlitt’s reply in the ‘Letter to William Gifford Esq.’ and copied pages of it in his journal-letter to his brother and sister-in-law in America, commenting on the ‘innate power with which it yeasts and words itself up – the feeling for the costume of society’. Gifford of course took the ...”

“... it is appropriate to cite the reaction of Mr Morel in Sons and Lovers after the death of his son William; it may even be authentically Arthur Lawrence’s.’ But what if Mr Morel’s reactions were not ‘authentically Arthur Lawrence’s’? – and there is no particular reason why they should be. Unlike some biographers, Worthen has at least been ...”