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“... was later translated into Old English, and further expanded by his near namesake Aelfric Bata, who may have been schoolmaster at Christ Church, Canterbury, and who wrote Colloquia of his own. Despite these admirable efforts, Latin was and remained a hard language to master. Reading some of Orme’s examples, one begins to wonder how anyone ever learned ...”

“... In opposition, Harold Wilson spoke out against American involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, during his Bevanite phase, he declared that ‘not a man, not a gun, must be sent from this country to defend French colonisation in Indo-China … we must not join or in any way encourage an anti-Communist crusade in Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else ...”

“... copied by generations of scholars and students up until the early 20th century. Today its facts may appear to be fossils, but even a compendium of seemingly obsolete knowledge has much to reveal about the context in which it was produced. What is significant when taking stock of the entire universe? What does one see? In al-Nuwayri’s world, lightning is ...”

“... paper reported that a new channel, GB News, to be led by Robbie Gibb, a former adviser to Theresa May, was granted a preliminary Ofcom licence in January, and hopes to launch next year. Gibb, who before working at Number Ten had held senior roles in BBC politics programming, has since become a dedicated critic of the corporation’s alleged cultural and ...”

“... sustainable competition’. But the Johnson government hasn’t yet indicated what compromises it may be willing to make, or what its new competition policy might look like. For many supporters of Brexit, taking power back from Brussels wasn’t supposed to be an end in itself, but a means to the end of rolling back the regulations imposed on the UK by ...”

“... true! It’s all fiction!’This ghoulish bedtime reading, which failed to cure my sleeplessness, may seem very much of our time. But The Tempest opens with a similar dialogue. Replace ‘pilot’ with ‘boatswain’, ‘trim servo’ and ‘autopilot aural warning’ with ‘topsail’ and ‘master’s whistle’, 20th-century howls with ...”

“... a zoophile on every committee won’t bring the New Jerusalem any closer. Assimilating more people may be a way of extending the sway of the system, not of transforming it. Anyway, when it comes to allowing serial child abusers to become schoolteachers, Sam Goldwyn’s legendary cry of ‘Include me out!’ has a point. Who decides who is to be included? And ...”

“... an ancestral cousin of smallpox, has been found in Viking-era burials in northern Europe, and it may have been this or something like it that affected the Romans.As Elliott notes, the smallpox theory is largely responsible for the scholarly consensus that the Antonine Plague was a very big deal: modern smallpox killed a third of its victims – between 300 ...”

“... of fuel for most of its vehicles in southern Gaza, limiting its ability to maintain order. On 7 May, World Central Kitchen, which had been delivering millions of meals to Gaza, ran out of provisions; on 12 May the World Health Organisation said it was running very low on medical supplies.During this period Israel ...”

“... with certain (white) cultural and political assumptions and connotations built in, some of which may be directly in conflict with the sort of experience the (black) writer wants to convey. How can a writer’s parole (individual speech or writing) make any headway against langue (the language system)? The problem is exactly analogous to that faced by ...”

“... reader, two warnings should be offered. The opening chapter, about Church and State, may seem the hardest: begin with Chapter Two. Secondly, do not expect tidy answers. Collinson’s thesis, although lucidly and vigorously presented, is honourably complex and tentative. This is the modern manner, history with its head ...”

“... but Paulin ranges widely in the 20 volumes of P.P. Howe’s complete edition, and his speculations may arm some readers for the harder climbs in Hazlitt’s work: brilliant metaphysical essays like ‘On Genius and Common Sense’ and ‘On Depth and Superficiality’’ and the demolition of the theory of self-interest and identity in the Principles of Human ...”

“... to the search for spiritual truth, this religious background deserves more attention. Pound may have turned against Christianity, but for much of his life he was looking for – and even sought to be – a saviour. Moody learned to write biography as he went along. His third volume is better presented than its predecessors, which have too many ...”

“... You may fear, from the title of this book, that they’ve found yet another ‘Boleyn girl’. The subject of this biography has already been fearlessly minced into fiction by the energetic Philippa Gregory. But there is no sign so far that another inert and vacuous feature film will be clogging up the multiplexes ...”

“... Donne, because his incandescent lines and his frivolous ones are found side by side; indeed, they may be the same lines, depending on how, or in what humour, you read them. This is true even of celebrated poems like ‘The Good-morrow’: I wonder, by my trothe, what Thou, and I Did, tyll we Lov’d, were wee not weand, tyll then? But suck’d on Countrey ...”