“... on the wind, Comes and goes on the brain. With the 1980s came The Passages of Joy, containing more free verse than ever before and speaking openly, for the first time, about the poet’s homosexuality. It also contained some of his weakest material to date, but he made a comeback in the early 1990s with The Man with Night Sweats, a ...”

“... At one moment in Thomas Pynchon’s novel named after them, Mason and Dixon pause to wonder what history’s verdict on their most famous work is likely to be, its ‘assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-à-vis the not-so-good’. A voice, apparently coming from nowhere, says: ‘You wonder? That’s all? What about “care”? Don’t you care?’ The surveyors explain to the voice that surveying is what they do ...”

“... next century, the idea of the bard became linked to Homeric epic. By 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...”

“... immediately after the routing of the French. Siborne’s model placed the Prussian forces at a more advanced position than Wellington had done, and so undermined the duke’s assertion that victory had been won largely by valiant British forces, with only a little help from the tardy Prussians. Siborne’s heresy, Hofschröer contends, proved his ...”

“... as they show off her powers as an ‘advocacy journalist’ – she used the reports to press for more comprehensive and generous relief – and because they prefigure The trouble I’ve seen, her first literary success, which drew directly on the same material to produce a more dramatic study, this time in fiction, of ...”

“... his own early philosophy, and since in any case it is now his later philosophy that is much the more influential, I don’t think we ought to devote too much of our time to the early work.’ Pears’s subtitle says ‘development’, and we expect that the next volume will not be about a new beginning. Pears holds that a work published by Wittgenstein ...”

“... posthumous) by single authors, in which printers tried to give a canonical stamp to work which was more appropriately read within a manuscript culture. John Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea appeared in 1646, four years after the poet’s death, probably by suicide, in France. Its printer places poems to the King at the start of the volume in order to make it look ...”

“... sympathies to have been wholly with the colonists, curtly informed by the colonial power that no more is demanded of them than ‘implicit obedience – unconditional submission – and your money’. Nor was the satire he directed at the English class system and religion, especially the established Church, or at contemporary attitudes to women’s ...”

“... I was reckoning VB as among the all-time greats’). In 2011, the Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas wore a navy-blue one for her hearing at the High Court in connection with the Ryan Giggs v. News Group superinjunction. And in Ballgowns: British Glamour since 1950 at the V&A (until 6 January 2013), you can see a full-length one-shouldered pink silk ...”

“... of such sentiments in February 1793, a few weeks after the execution of Louis XVI, seemed to have more than mere philosophical speculation in mind. The Enquiry was discussed by Pitt’s cabinet in May, but although the book might have been expected to encounter the full force of the law – as Paine’s similarly argued Rights of Man (1791) had done two years ...”

“... have emerged. Their emergence testifies to the fact, I gather, that nations sometimes get far more, and far better, than their inhabitants of the day deserve. Yeats tried to win his countrymen into Unity of Being, but they chose instead the more succulent joys of division, opting for the courtroom as the theatre of ...”

“... still only 33 years old and has another 44 years to go; no doubt they will be less action-packed, more sedate – containable, one hopes, in only one more volume. Yet although Haffenden does, here and there, provide copious information on matters of rather marginal interest, his book justifies its length by supplying a mass ...”

“... To my surprise, he was delighted with that. Yes, a love-child he was. As I got to know more about his background, I began to see what he meant. His father and mother, both fiercely independent characters, ‘married at leisure but repented in haste’, as he put it. They quarrelled and parted within months of the ceremony and Karl was born at ...”

“... the least worst choice from a pack of bizarre characters seemingly drawn from reality TV shows or Thomas Pynchon novels, but he’s not finding much love, even at his own coronation. Only 27 per cent of Americans think that he’s a ‘likeable’ guy. (Obama gets 61 per cent.) On television he projects a strange combination of self-satisfaction and an ...”

“... and went to school in Lüneburg. In short he was, like Will, an exotic, and played to the fact. More important, he had been educated, to the limit of his father’s shabby genteel means, in the German Romantics. He was also, in youth, extremely handsome and could have slipped comfortably into any number of Victorian novels. His experience of public life was ...”