“... come to assume that the thorn in the flesh of the Nato culture was one of their own, but when E.P. Thompson attempted to presume O’Brien onto his side in the matter of CND there was a predictable and pyrotechnic response, with great carnage in the Thompson ranks. O’Brien is not a man to accept that presumptive arm around ...”

“... down in a stream with her legs in the air. Footprints incriminate Edith’s estranged husband, John, who had left her for a barmaid nine years previously. Shardlake suspects John Boleyn has been framed. If he hangs, which seems likely, it would scandalise Elizabeth, who orders an investigation and wants him pardoned if ...”

“... violence: it is a survivalist world, bleak and uncompromising – the world of competitive chess. John Healy arrived there, without papers or proof of identity, a drowning man coming up for the last time. It was his only way of escaping from the slow-motion suicide of alcoholism, and he took it with manic relish. His book, The Grass Arena, is a devastating ...”

“... douched, frozen, pilled, potioned, lotioned, salivated … by Act of Parliament?’ blustered John Gibbs, hydropath and teetotaller, in a pamphlet denouncing the act. The anti-vaccination movement was born. It was, initially, little more than a collection of outraged scribblers: the 1853 Act was easily evaded and Poor Law Unions, which had quite enough to ...”

“... and bones? only Jimmy and a few dons. It’s sentimental, don’t you know? and neither Hill, nor Thompson, plodding Williams or doggy Foot can swing the people. Whoever’s heard of Despard, Plug, or Captain Ludd? – dumped in Burford Churchyard bee thoi oll. No, we must lie down and let the Tebbit knock us through the ground. He’s got the goods, as Clive ...”

“... a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore Sottsass, ‘Neal Cassady, Los Gatos, California’ (1962) Bernard ...”

“... had been at least part of the inspiration for a book by one of the editors of this volume, John Elliott: his Richelieu and Olivares (1984). For all that this volume is produced with the lavishness we have come to expect from Yale University Press, with no less than 74 illustrations, most of them portraits of 37 ‘favourites’ and of the monarchs they ...”

“... in Adam Roberts’s book It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (Elliott & Thompson, £14.99), 41 per cent of Americans and 58 per cent of white evangelical Christians believe Jesus will return before 2050, while 83 per cent of Muslims in Afghanistan, 72 per cent in Iraq and 68 per cent in Turkey anticipate the arrival of the Mahdi (the ...”

“... newspapers.* Last summer? Well, that problem was solved last week when the Gospel according to St John, all 1300 pages of it, beat the dust out of the doormat. It is a sure sign that spring is in the air when Wisden arrives. While there is a good twelve months browse therein, one flick through is enough to stir the brain cells. It is the cricketer’s holy ...”

“... off far better than the single excursion beyond letters. In this batch it is the excellence of John Barrell’s Poetry, Language and Politics which stands out, providing some compensatory cover for the shortcomings of its companion volumes. Barrell’s fine study of language and power in English poetry takes issue with the enduring assumptions of ...”

“... but (once Glover has got hold of them) by William Cowper, Byron, the sailor-satirist Edward Thompson, and the anonymous author of a splendid poem called ‘The Stage Coach’, much anthologised in the Georgian period. A few lines are quoted from each of these writers, and every single quotation contains one or more obvious errors – often, it ...”

“... exercised via the students who became teachers, mostly in grammar schools. Leavisites like Denys Thompson and Raymond O’Malley produced English textbooks for them to use and edited the journal Use of English, which provided model lessons and exercises. It also promoted practical criticism teaching in schools, in the Leavis manner, via pairings of admirable ...”

“... year’s general election, it was obvious they were overwhelmingly likely to lose the next one. John Smith, who took over the leadership of the Labour Party, was an advocate of what was called ‘one more heave’: that Labour should carry on more or less as it had been doing since Kinnock took over in 1983, present itself as the responsible face of social ...”

“... refuges for repentant prostitutes or bankrupted merchants. Shortly before his death in 1791, John Wesley looked back on the century as one in which ‘benevolence and compassion toward all the forms of human woe have increased in a manner not known before, from the earliest ages of the world.’ Not everyone was sympathetic to forms of woe – especially ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”