“... 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 ...”

“... the Venerable Bede, and its modern exponents include such engaging and stylish writers as Charles Thomas, Leslie Alcock and Henry Mayr-Harting. The literary sources have attracted much idiosyncratic talent, for they possess the fascination of a cryptic crossword in which one must sift fact from propaganda, post-Norman Conquest forgery from dimly glimpsed ...”

“... meta-ethics draws inspiration from Pragmatism, the American philosophical tradition developed by William James, C.S. Peirce and John Dewey. Pragmatists urged philosophers, and culture as a whole, to let go of their preoccupation with truth. Do not ask whether beliefs or theories are true, they suggested, but whether they are useful. Truth is a secondary ...”

“... filmmakers. The novelist Cesare Pavese went so far as to compare De Sica, perhaps ironically, with Thomas Mann, as the author of a national narrative. Had movies superseded literature? The Futurists thought so, proposing in one 1916 manifesto a cinema that would ‘co-operate in the general renewal, taking the place of the literary review (always pedantic) and ...”

“... The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades ...”

“... Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody ...”

“... man: as respected and influential as his own early schoolmaster in Dorset, the dialect poet William Barnes. These professional distinctions had no more to do with his service to the Elephant Man than did his lifelong devotion to literature (he once wrote a book on Browning’s The Ring and the Book, illustrated with 100 photographs he had taken at the ...”

“... In early 1616, when Carr and his wife were found guilty of having poisoned their former friend Thomas Overbury, Buckingham became James’s master of the horse. No post in the royal household guaranteed greater proximity or influence. Buckingham was now the ‘man by whom all things do and must pass’.James called Buckingham ‘Steenie’ – short for St ...”

“... long, elegant fingers that were always flying upward) to hide a beautiful gap-toothed smile. (Thomas Victor’s photograph, reproduced on the dust-jacket of the Collected, catches the smile convincingly.) Salter also fills in, for Clampitt’s new readers, the moral background to the poems. It was Quakers who had settled New Providence, but a more ...”

“... the outbreak of the Revolution at Lexington and Concord. The British commander-in chief, General Thomas Gage, gets as much attention as Paul Revere. There have been many versions of the battles at Lexington and Concord, but all of them have been superseded by Fischer, who has made it unnecessary to produce another one. Among other things, he has cleansed the ...”

“... in art and stultifying Victorian versifying. Some of this vast body of poetry was superb (William Carlos Williams), most of it mediocre and some of it dreadful. Burke’s verse hovers around the middle of the spectrum, the best of it plain-spoken and terse in the American idiom which Williams was perfecting, the worst allusive in the manner of ...”

“... But while Byron was disowned by the Victorians, embarrassed that this ‘huge sulky dandy’, as Thomas Carlyle called him, should have received so much adoration and respect, Felicia Hemans’s reputation grew, and her work went out of print only after the First World War. Her importance in dictating the taste for patriotism, obedience and sacrifice in ...”

“... the law. A second view, developed and prolifically publicised by a barrister journalist named William Finlason in the aftermath of the rising, was that martial law replaced all civil authority with the will of the military commander – subject only to what Finlason delphically called ‘natural justice’ or, as Disraeli later put it in the ...”

“... for Protestants to see Jane as the best legitimate heir. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, openly and precisely said that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards. Mary’s remarkable initial success came from single-mindedly stressing the one asset she possessed: bastard or no bastard, she was ...”

“... 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 ...”