“... 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 ...”

“... of the Craiglockhart in-house magazine, the Hydra, of which Owen was the editor, and the following May was awarded a consolation prize in a poetry competition organised by the Bookman. His next poem, ‘Has Your Soul Sipped?’, also makes use of pararhyme, insistent alliteration and languorous, decadent, erotic diction: ‘Sweeter than nocturnes/Of the wild ...”

“... refers to another printer, Abel Jeffes, having ‘claymed’ the copyright on the Damnable Life in May 1592, and Greg argues that since this claim is not in the usual form of a licensing entry in the Company register, it must have been in the form of publication. Many feel that this inference is questionable, given the rapacities and inconsistencies of ...”

“... Ocean acidification, a chief cause of the Great Permian Extinction some 250 million years ago, may come to factor in the ‘mass extinction event’ – a planetary culling of life-forms with few rivals in the earth’s history – currently taking place. For now, fatal habitat loss, both underwater and on land, has more to do with local conditions ...”

“... at and I fell in with the mood as best I could. Nowadays I think matters in the world of poetry may be changing and I long to get back to where I began. I should like to spend the rest of my working life writing as I have in this poem but it may be a delusion of approaching old age; I just don’t ...”

“... too true to be good, painful indeed, as they clearly render acts of brutal injustice which women may expect to encounter as they live their lives. But for some of us the announcement of the truth after an era of lies and fictions is itself a pleasure – the mind, as Dr Johnson indicated, delighting to rest on the stability of truth. Both writers appear to ...”

“... it is rich and powerful but because it has overcome many forms of selfishness and sadism and may overcome still more’. In 1997, Rorty consolidated these attacks on fellow leftists into a series of lectures, now published as Achieving Our Country. The title alludes to James Baldwin, commenting on the aloofness of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam ...”

“... in Jameson, not Mandel – is a mark of immaturity, an outworn college creed. The thing itself may grow old with us, but the term can’t be used by middle-aged grown-ups participating in the real world (that is to say, the surface of the earth, minus college campuses). The same may go for ‘postmodernism’, a word ...”

“... at the Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility ...”

“... and Grassic Gibbon (1922-35), the flow of oil and gas from the bed of the North Sea (1977-?). It may be that our nationalism is on a par with feminism as Dale Spender sees it: for ever having to be painfully rediscovered, rather than evolving continuously from strength to strength, without relapses between those peaks where consciousness, at least, is ...”

“... it was the product of two earlier drafts that had been discovered by Avon and Somerset Police in May 1989. The document, the Crown alleged, was created to back up the police officers’ version of the interrogation, to create the impression that the information contained in Armstrong’s confession had been volunteered by him. Since there was no evidence ...”