“... must be prepared to take seriously premodern other-worldliness, to grapple with what St Augustine said about grace at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, and how Augustine was reinterpreted in the 16th century, most crucially by Luther, and in 17th-century France by Jansenists, who as hyper-Augustinians believed in a high doctrine of ...”

“... of men on the ground. Two platoons were suggested or even less or a military field hospital. Bundy said that the result of such a contribution would be worth “several hundred million dollars”.’ While this offer seems to have been withdrawn, for fear of alienating Wilson, US memoranda make clear that it represents the thinking of the Johnson ...”

“... chimerical. It had no bearing on culture, intelligence or any of the multitude of things it was said to determine; nor were the so-called races hierarchically organised.By the 1930s Boas was using scare quotes around the word ‘race’: it was, he said, ‘at best a poetic and dangerous fiction’. He was continually ...”

“... involving 184,000 members of the National Union of Mineworkers and their families. It is usually said to have begun in early March 1984 when miners walked out of Cortonwood colliery in South Yorkshire after it was announced that the pit was to be closed along with nineteen others across Britain. Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM, decided to use the ...”

“... I meant nothing by the lighthouse,’ Virginia Woolf said of the novel she published in 1927. ‘I trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions.’ To the Lighthouse, her fifth novel, outsold the previous four and readers have been depositing or discovering their emotions in it ever since ...”

“... never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare,’ Pitt is reported to have said. The men who had most to gain from the idea that subjects should judge the value of political institutions for themselves would never be able to afford Godwin’s book.If the Enquiry concerning Political Justice didn’t count as sedition, what did? When the ...”

“... right simile here, because sometimes he was lunching judges) and tried to remember everything they said. Taking notes was out of the question: ‘nothing would be more likely to cause an informant to clam up.’ He was happy to be recognised as ‘the Lone Wolf of Fleet Street’ and to spurn friendship with colleagues and rivals. His personality had a ...”

“... in pretending to help people capture Robin Hood. He is the only figure in the DNB who is said never to have existed. Stephen Knight grants that ‘it seems highly improbable, or at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold ...”

“... Powell offered members and voters a politically potent vision of a Conservative patria in a way Edward Heath never did. At many points during the last 150 years, Tory backbenchers and members have been frustrated by the inability of their leaders to provide the inspirational direction they crave, though they have often struggled to define what that might ...”

“... there was one devell too many amongst them.’ They explained the situation to the audience, and said they ‘could go no further with this matter’. The audience promptly fled – ‘every man hastened to be first out of dores’ – and the players spent the night in unaccustomed prayer and meditation. For some, such anecdotes suggest, Faustus was a ...”

“... most admired, whom he had learnt from, before whom he ‘felt humble’. Leavis, Priestley said, ‘did mischief to the art he was boarded and lodged to serve’ – rather a revealing comment. ‘To be an author was to invite damnation’ at the hands of his critical Calvinism. The two had in common a secret dissatisfaction: Priestley with the writers ...”

“... his heart ... For a while he thought that she understood ... ‘But death is nothing,’ she said ... he was struck dumb: he had forgotten that he spoke to an alien intelligence, that would not suffer the rebellious creed that was his. It is as though Sassoon is unable to acknowledge his own rebellion. Perhaps this should not surprise us. For the ...”

“... one for a British, the other for an American magazine. Through Pound, Frost also met Yeats, who is said to have praised his new work (‘the best poetry written in America for a long time’). Frost soon became friendly with the Georgian poets, Lascelles Abercrombie, W.H. Davies and Wilfrid Gibson, and he formed a truly close friendship, probably the closest ...”

“... place. It was at the Gare du Nord in Paris, just after Easter 1895, that Ada, his cousin’s wife, said to him: ‘You are just the person to write. Why don’t you?’ Later in the year they became lovers, though a decade was to pass before she obtained a divorce and they could marry: it is not clear whether Galsworthy could not bear to break his father’s ...”

“... lady, an art-world insider, a Proust fanatic and a New Woman. At her funeral, Georgia O’Keeffe said: ‘Florine made no concessions of any kind to any person or situation.’ But she was also great fun. When she finished a painting, she gave it a tea party, inviting a (carefully curated) collection of guests.Writing about Stettheimer in 1980, Linda Nochlin ...”