“... The first recorded discovery of such an object occurred in June 1797 when the English antiquary John Frere caught sight of two marvellous examples deep in a hole dug by brick workers in Suffolk. Convinced that these were ‘weapons … used by a people who had not the use of metals’, Frere traced them to ‘a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of ...”

“... pretty much the same as it did in 1957, when I visited it, curious about the subject on which John Davis has now given us a first-rate, concise and attractively written book. San Nicandro has made only two entrances onto the historical stage. It was an early centre of Italian socialism and agrarian struggle in the grain-fields of northern Apulia, whose ...”

“... hymns and liturgical texts. One could scarcely imagine a better concise guide to the Scrolls than John Collins’s The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography. Collins, who teaches at Yale, writes with clarity and liveliness, and throughout his account exercises great judiciousness, a quality that has not always been prominent in discussions of this subject. For the ...”

“... and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the symposium quite manages to say, yet almost everyone darkly hints at, is that in 1972 the ‘Poundian revolution’ still looked as if it was carrying the world before it. Trailing ...”

“... Barrett’s almost accent-free ‘First Greek Ode’, she cuts out a dimension of her story. A fuller account would begin with the neoclassicism of Charlotte Lennox, the novelist and Shakespeare critic who in 1759 translated Pierre Brumoy’s book of versions and commentaries, The Greek Theatre. Or even with Nicholas Udall, who wrote in 1548 of ‘young ...”

“... author of The History of British India.’ The father-author thus announced at the beginning of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography dominated his life from early childhood on. Did he in any sense author his son’s life as he authored his books? John Stuart Mill wrote his own Life in large part to work out an answer to ...”

“... enlarge our knowledge of architecture or of Venetian history from him. We should read him for a fuller understanding of Victorian culture, or to investigate the intellectual roots of those who were influenced by him. We can enjoy and learn from his writings on geology, or the Bible, or mythology. All important and legitimate reasons, yet none will quite ...”

“... permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger. In Ways of Seeing, Berger presented on television for the first time an ideological analysis of art and aesthetics. One of the programmes juxtaposed pin-ups and centrefolds with Titians, in a powerful early assault on advertising. Thirty years ...”

“... to the age before print. If anything, the wealth of sources from the early modern period gives a fuller sense of the places books might be read aloud – among them, ‘church, university colleges, the printing house, theatrical spaces, ordinaries, barber shops, prison’.Richards’s focus is less on oral culture, however, than on the physical voice. She ...”

“... meaning become fainter’. ‘We face,’ he says, ‘a continuing struggle to realise higher and fuller modes of authenticity against the resistance of the flatter and shallower forms.’ Taylor’s clearest example of such a flatter and shallower form is what he calls a ‘merely anthropocentric’ ecological policy – one in which restraint in the use of ...”

“... of Global 2000. They maintain that the problems are regional and national rather than world-wide. John Wise considers that fish resources are at least keeping pace with world population increase and that, in spite of pollution, aquaculture and fish farming in general do not seem to be suffering in any major way. It is admitted that nationally and regionally ...”

“... notion had been realised it would probably have made but a slender volume. As it is, the much fuller book begins with the strangely and partly comprehensible extract from the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer, which is as much about the farer as the sea, and then goes on to Canto XII of The Faerie Queene, in which the water is only the medium for one of those ...”

“... In​ U&I (1991), his book about John Updike, Nicholson Baker imagines explaining the appeal of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library to his literary hero. ‘You know, once you get used to the initially kind of disgusting level of homosexual sex, which quickly becomes really interesting as a kind of ethnography, you realise that this is really one of the best first novels to come along in years and years!’ But Updike couldn’t get used to the sex ...”

“... but diverse answers to the diverse problems that have composed the muddle. The American journalist John Simon has for some years been writing a column in Esquire in which he takes a conservative view of linguistic change in true dinner-party fashion: opposing almost every innovation in contemporary usage, and mixing up several independent considerations in the ...”

“... Party days in Stavropol, which he ended by ruling as First Secretary. The portrait she provides is fuller than the meagre picture which official sources and interviews made possible even in the days of glasnost – Soviet leaders sanitise and guard their pasts. But it is still thin. I cannot believe that anyone would tell a foreign journalist (perhaps even ...”