“... rule them despotically. It is acknowledged, however, that he had sponsored the researches of Sir William Jones,4 which had laid scientific foundations for the truth that Hindus and Muslims had laws and knew what property was. Hastings, of whose guilt Dr O’Brien is in no doubt, is a complex figure, though less so than that strange mixture of villainy and ...”

“... would have had to relate the history of Western Europe in the 17th century, a subject his friend William Robertson had not explored; and the history of the succession to the English and Scottish thrones would have involved him in issues, still very heated, on which his own family had shown Jacobite leanings and of which radical Whig readings were being ...”

“... had brought out crucial differences between the two men which each had refused to see: as William Haller said long ago in his astute and still highly readable Early Life of Robert Southey (1917), the scheme was thrilling to Coleridge as a philosophical experiment, while appealing to Southey chiefly as a set of rules. Coleridge, ever eager to find in ...”

“... of the latter occasions have long been in the public domain, not least because the young William Empson occasionally attended (he did so, with characteristic Empsonian brio, without actually going to any of the lectures). The lectures were eventually published, in an exemplary edition by Ronald Schuchard, in 1993, and since Schuchard had access to ...”

“... States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony ...”

“... he had been drinking heavily that weekend. At 51 Western Road, a bathing machine proprietor called William Birkin overheard some of the row on Easter Sunday. He heard Bill shout: ‘You bloody rotten cow – You rotten bugger.’ The couple were using ‘the filthiest language I had ever heard’, Birkin said. The next day he saw Rose Gooding with her eye ...”

“... makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature ...”

“... the lawyers who stood between the accused and the gallows commanded admiration, and none more than William Garrow, the most successful and most celebrated defence counsel of the later Georgian years. To Langbein, however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as Thomas Erskine, a more ...”

“... began on 8 May 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by its chairman, Parnell Thomas, and its chief investigator, Robert Stripling, ‘set up shop’ at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. The first response by the industry to notice of an investigation appeared forthright and dignified. A Committee for the First Amendment was formed, and ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”

“... 17th centuries, alongside which later Viennese classicism appeared a bland retreat. When you hear William Byrd and Thomas Tallis for the first time, you don’t know where things are going; there are weird harmonies and tonal shifts, curious crooked cadences that loom suddenly from unlit verges. And such dissonances! In the ...”

“... here. First there is the economical Miesian minicampus of the Catholic University of St Thomas, built in the late Fifties, a place and moment at which, as Stephen Fox says, ‘the spirit of the new entered Houston.’ Nearly twenty years later he designed with John Burgee the first of his giant commercial buildings, Pennzoil Place. It stands towards ...”

“... enjoyed hay rides in the back of her ‘Uncle’ John’s hay cart; that she has a brother called Thomas and another called William and a twin sister called Elizabeth; that her mother recently died of cancer; that her father is called Hastings and is a retired colonel. That is about it. This might serve as a modest sketch ...”

“... life went on as usual. Names central to Renaissance scholarship appear on page after page – Thomas More, Peter Giles, Martin Dorpius, Pirckheimer, Amerbach, Tunstall, Lascaris, Zazius. So do the names of people for whom Erasmus scholars feel especial warmth – Grocyn, say, or William Warham, the Archbishop of ...”

“... as Heidegger and Bultmann. My fore-understanding cannot be quite the same as that of St Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza or indeed of anybody whatsoever: which leads to relativism, and the opinion that because all fore-understandings are different there can be no one universally acceptable reading of a text. There are, broadly speaking, two schools in ...”