“... essence with any thing solid or any thing lasting.’ But others found this odd sense of irreality more winning, or at least arresting. Getting to know him for the first time, his future sister-in-law reported delightedly that Shelley behaved ‘just as if he were Adam in Paradise before his fall’, and she was not alone in finding in him an innocence of the ...”

“... of what she called the ‘master story’ of Christianity. There was no reason for Sabar to be more cautious at the time. The text had been vetted by the Harvard Theological Review, and although two of the three anonymous reviewers had been sceptical, the world’s leading papyrologist, Roger Bagnall, had pronounced the fragment genuine. King had assured ...”

“... be hard but in some ways it’s easier than painting in watercolour, and watercolours are often more beautiful. However, the prejudice the rhyme encapsulates does arise from real differences. A typical oil painting is an object, a substantial piece of work displayed on a wall. Its colour is strong, the paint may be thick, may even stand proud of the picture ...”

“... first simply searches your belongings for signs that you are who you say you are; the second is more concerned to establish your guilt by planting some offending item upon you. On the one hand are the followers of E.D. Hirsch, whose concern is to establish the original and ‘correct’ meaning of a text. According to Hirsch, this is the meaning the author ...”

“... its vigour, and an index of civility. In the early 16th century, though, Neo-Latin verse was much more than this. It was a rich political resource. Neo-Latin panegyrics were a good means of winning friends and pleasing princes. Latin verse was also the perfect medium for humanist poets who wished to go beyond the parochial constraints of national politics to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”