“... under my feet then drifted, swole, each bubble’s angle reflecting a diamond nova from both its north and south pole.’ The swole/pole consonance is an alienation effect, immediately drawing attention to the writer’s exertions, and one wonders where exactly Morvern’s lexicology had encountered the Miltonic ‘swole’ or the astronomical precision of ...”

“... feel there is no nobility to our rain, no dignity, no beauty, none of the honour of extremity. In John Mortimer’s novel Paradise Postponed, a woman living in the country calls the doctor in a state of agitation. He arrives and asks what’s wrong. ‘That,’ she said, pointing out of the window. ‘It’s so quiet and green and it’s always ...”

“... not only because he worked hard at them, but also because he listened to advice, especially from John Gardner but also, more remotely, from Hemingway, Chekhov and V.S. Pritchett. One of the things he learned was the need for arduous revision, draft after draft. Another lesson was that the writer needs to trust the tale. Lawrence notoriously advised the ...”

“... Assembly and the London mayoral contest were notable examples. Well before the 2001 election, John Kampfner described Cook as an isolated figure forced to recognise both that he would never succeed Blair as party leader, and that he had been decisively out-manoeuvred by his long-term political rival Gordon Brown.* Strongly influenced by the media furore ...”

“... the American Revolution remain a conundrum. Why did the colonies that had supported Britain in its North American struggle against France between 1754 and 1763 turn so quickly against Britain’s relatively benign parliamentary government? Understandably enough, British attempts after 1763 to make the colonists contribute to the costs of imperial defence ...”

“... cold. Pepys looked at the megaliths in 1668 and shrugged: ‘God knows what their use was.’ John Aubrey, the first person to make a serious study of stone circles, put his finger on the problem: ‘These Antiquities are so exceeding old that no Bookes doe reach them.’ He developed a more effective method. Using measurements and comparative surveys of ...”

“... their fleas) who marched through the Piedmont countryside. The epidemic raged through the north, only slowing when it reached the natural barrier of the Apennines. On the other side of the mountains, Florence braced itself. The officials of the Sanità, the city’s health board, wrote anxiously to their colleagues in Milan, Verona, Venice, in the ...”

“... political event – a symbol of colonial exploitation and neglect. In 1861 the radical nationalist John Mitchel published The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), in which he blamed the British government for the devastation. ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,’ he wrote, ‘but the English created the Famine … and a million and a half ...”

“... human context, in the midst of a like-minded radical intelligentsia: William Frend, George Dyer, John Thelwall, Basil Montagu, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Losh, Joseph Fawcett. Roe’s research has been strenuous, his attention to detail earnest, and his book will be useful. But it will not be quite as useful as ...”

“... half-whisper that someone called Colm Tóibín was in the library looking at the correspondence of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me ...”

“... solidarities between rich and poor in Italian society. They took different forms, certainly, in north and south, town and country, but from the state’s point of view they all represented a challenge to its authority and therefore, by definition, to the rule of law. By the 1880s it was widely believed in Italy that no state in Europe was more dogged by ...”

“... idea of self-ownership that has played a central role in recent libertarian thought, especially in North America. To these tasks Cohen brings formidable analytical and forensic skills, and the book is an outstanding example of the intellectual gains to be won by clear and rigorous thinking about questions that are usually blanketed by ideological fog. It is ...”

“... was one of the ‘gate-crashers’ of whom Mr Gittings writes so disapprovingly. I entered by the north transept door merely by showing my visiting-card and was ushered into a choir stall just where the coffin came to a halt. The pallbearers or chief mourners were an odd assembly. First came the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and the Leader of the ...”

“... the casualty of the Falklands War, although if blame is to be allocated, I would place it on Sir John Nott, the Secretary of State for Defence, whose policy of running down the Royal Navy (with Mrs Thatcher’s support) gave the Junta the signal it sought to embark on a bit of smash and grab. I was on the platform at the sensational meeting of the ...”

“... of Hutcheson and the Ulster Enlightenment of the 18th century is what is now needed both south and north of the border. He might have added that it was the Union that effectively extinguished it. ‘Heathcliff and the Great Hunger’ is the title of Eagleton’s first chapter, but it is not sufficiently indicative of the book as a whole. It inserts Brontë’s ...”