“... three canvases. He struggled to find inspiration: he read widely in philosophy, fiction, poetry in English and French; frequently went to movies and plays; sometimes drove thousands of miles to New England, Mexico or the American West, yet found little to spark new work. Often his wife would provoke him by starting a picture herself. Often they would create ...”

“... Erminia, who loves a Christian. Although Linnaean classifications were ‘too smutty’ for English women – all those reproductive organs – she was an ardent botanist, and sent expeditions to Africa, to bring back geraniums. While other bluestockings might have found themselves unmarriageable, her father’s early death had left her everything, and ...”

“... Both Dracula and Frankenstein owed their immediate afterlife to unfortunate theatre adaptations. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) turned Mary Shelley’s book into a moralistic tale of hubris, as well as making the creature mute and introducing Victor Frankenstein’s pantomimic assistant (here called Fritz). The ...”

“... early that it was my duty to imitate them’), and his making his son do ‘exercises in early English history and the book of the Peerage’. When Harry proudly performs his knowledge, he comes to expect their landlady’s ‘invariable whisper: “Blood Rile,” she said; and her friends all said “No!” like the run of a finger down a ...”

“... politics and Irish history. But Connolly’s work has not always been taken seriously. Last year, Richard Bourke and I tried to remedy this by publishing a selection of his writings in The Political Thought of the Irish Revolution.* Liam McNulty’s new book also helps us to understand the international and transnational contexts that shaped Connolly’s ...”

“... him. Bunyan is ‘this dreamer and penman’, ‘the most prominent man of letters as far as English literature is concerned’, who had ‘the tinker’s power of reaching the heart’ – there is a hint of rural superstition and natural magic here. He admires Bunyan for his ‘strong doctrinal preaching’, his opposition to the civil and ...”

“... Kathleen (Kay) Morrison, the wife of Theodore (Ted) Morrison, a lecturer in the Department of English at Harvard. Since this fact (documented in Thompson’s ‘Notes’ and now further documented thanks to the co-operation of Kay Morrison’s daughter) was made known by Frost to many bystanders, and broadly hinted at by previous commentators on Frost, it ...”

“... for more than flashes of self-revelation. More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s ...”

“... completely instinctive obsessional thing’. In 1969 Faber published The Bog People, the English translation of a book by the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob, which was full of striking black and white images of their strange, patient faces – ‘Donatello-like’, Bernard O’Donoghue once said – the beauty of which Glob celebrated in what was in ...”

“... of the school day, among plane trees and an exotic palm from the Canary Islands. It’s all rather English pastoral. The girls sport straw boaters … North of the square you find Grosvenor Street and a row of fashionable 18th-century Georgian townhouses. This was once the abode of earls, lords, admirals and the odd poet … The location radiates ...”

“... a Contemporary’. The voice’s inflections are, if we like, upperclass or at least authoritarian English of the reader or writer’s own period, with a powerful assurance written in every phrase, as in that still encountered idiom by which proprietorship is signalled by the addition of ‘my’ to properties sometimes unexpected: my plumber, my milkman, my ...”

“... He was mad, but he was not just mad. There is more to know. This is the historical lacuna that Richard Noll exploits in his disturbing and often illuminating book. Noll comes to the quest for the historical Jung – his phrase – with a broad background in Jungianism, psychiatry and shamanism and his training stands him in good stead much of the time. He ...”

“... more subtle and peculiar sense it is true of a great poet-artist like Pasternak. The tradition in English is different: the greatness in poetry of a Yeats or an Eliot, however complex a matter, does not depend directly on their ‘views’, or upon their self-appointed role in society. Their legend is personal, not exemplary, and their achievement as poets is ...”

“... Supreme Council, insisting that ‘the cause was not the Irish Republic’ but ‘liberation from English occupation’.* Certainly it ‘did not change the relationship between one class of Irishmen and another’, according to the historian of Sinn Féin Michael Laffan, quoted by Diarmaid Ferriter in his recent book A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish ...”

“... stopped them. Behind the old confidence lay a peculiar history. The idea of a civil service is an English idea, but its origins do not lie in England. The first ‘civil servants’ were the administrators of the East India Company’s ‘military servants’. It wasn’t only the label that distinguished them from their counterparts in early 19th-century ...”