“... part of his aesthetic if not devotional landscape. ‘How delightful the Capala shrine is!’ he said during his terminal illness – an expression of pleasure of a kind which the scribes setting down the otherwise austere transmission, hundreds of years after his death, perhaps heard too little of. The Amaravati stupa, like other ruined shrines, combined ...”

“... straight from his sloping forehead: galb-like wings to his nostrils – the goat-like profile of Edward the Peacemaker. The lips were curved. They were thickly profiled as though belonging to a moslem portrait of a stark-lipped sultan. His eyes, vacillating and easily discomforted, slanted down to the heavy curved nose. Eyes, nose and lips contributed to one ...”

“... political community’. And if there is any principle on which the international community can be said to agree, it is that intervention, so defined, is legally and morally illegitimate. Every nation, no matter what its size or power, is entitled to internal sovereignty. All states have an obligation to refrain from violating the sovereignty of others. It is ...”

“... time, the less love is to be found in the family, and the more brutal the treatment of children. Edward Shorter’s The Making of the Modern Family (1975), now read in many European countries, defiantly announced that mothers have not always loved their offspring. Lawrence Stone, whose book Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) prints some ...”

“... Layard’, as he is affectionately termed in one of Auden’s early poems – is said to have told a submarine officer that he had grown a beard as a masculine protest against the mechanical womb he inhabited. And in Portrait of the Artist a young man informs his friend that he admires, the Venus de Milo because her broad hips show she would ...”

“... late 1930s, leading into the era of the Manhattan project and Hiroshima. Is there much more to be said, now, about that dramatic course of events? There is a suggestion that if Truman had been told about the lingering horrors of radioactivity he might have decided against dropping the bombs on Japan, but that is sheer conjecture. In any case, the military ...”

“... and also in bringing within a single argument Ossian, Stukeley’s Stonehenge, the Druids, Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg), radical antiquarians such as Douce and Ritson, and several forms of primitivism. The chapter on mythography does not succeed quite so well. It concerns a problem which has preoccupied Blake scholars for many years: given Blake’s ...”

“... ultimately was) – is perhaps the first to engage properly with its provisions. He reveals that Edward Carson, the Dublin-born lawyer who led the unionist opposition to Home Rule, was a strong supporter of the body and ‘optimistic enough to hope [that it contained] the germ of a united Ireland in [the] future’. Similarly, Townshend’s exploration of ...”

“... confused. The vast majority reported being ‘unsure’ about the vaccine’s safety; two-thirds said they were no longer sure of its effectiveness. Something similar happened in Japan in 2014. In response to scientifically unfounded concerns raised by mothers’ groups, the government downgraded its HPV vaccination policy from ‘proactive’ to ...”

“... and fight. ‘I broke a bloke’s jaw once,’ he writes, because he ‘spilled my beer and never said sorry’. Brian remembers him coming home from the pub plastered: ‘There’d be trouble if his dinner wasn’t on the table. Or, if the fire wasn’t to his liking he’d smash up the furniture and burn it.’ Bob’s father once carried a dead pig up to ...”

“... tampering with manuscripts). The men of this new age were scholars, working in a tradition often said to have originated with Malone and achieving, in the 20th century, an extraordinary degree of refinement. They were pioneers, but were too easily excited, and enjoyed too much liberty. As collectors they were prone, as a contemporary put it, to experience ...”

“... well expressed by Patrick Kavanagh, a friend of his from wartime Dublin: Give us another poem, he said Or they will think your muse is dead; Another middle-aged departure Of Apollo from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with Elizabeth Bowen and L.P. Hartley, had lost their edge as writers. In these often ...”

“... his career in the service of the Marathas, and sired numerous part-Indian children by (it was said) 16 wives and mistresses. In a small yard outside the church, members of his multi-ethnic clan lie buried. Some of their tombs have crosses on top and epitaphs on the side in Persian – memorials to a period in Anglo-Indian history when European and Eastern ...”

“... his SDP adventure, and his Presidency of the European Commission – none of which can be said to illuminate the main story in any significant way. Both are anxious to establish Churchill’s ‘greatness’. Best incorporates the word into his subtitle; Jenkins finishes his book – rather feebly, in view of all the much more interesting points that ...”

“... employed in, say, Keele, or Leeds, this might never have happened. So there is something to be said after all for the location of the University of Cambridge, which, as its denizens tend to complain, is a dank sort of fenny place with nothing to protect it from the chill winds of Siberia but the low hills of the Urals. Some thought that Duffy’s great ...”