“... convinced him that myths originated independently around the world in the thought processes of ‘savage’ peoples. Such speculations contradicted the theories of Friedrich Max Müller, the comparative philologist who then dominated Oxford. Müller argued that mythology originated in the spiritual insights of the Aryans of ancient India. Over time their ...”

“... in which he argued – largely on the evidence of directions taken by several serious poets (Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and Ed Dorn are those who come to mind) – that the North American imagination is beginning to define its identity no longer on a West-East axis, across the Atlantic to ...”

“... some of these magnates (Ralph of Burgundy, Hugh Capet’s great-uncle Odo and his grandfather Robert I) were elected king. When the direct line of Carolingians came to an end with the death of the young Louis V in 987, the claims of his uncle, Charles of Lorraine, were contested by Hugh Capet, count of Paris.Hugh’s success owed much to the support of ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... primitive sources of poetry – the Eliot who once said that ‘Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle.’ It is good to learn from the recent engaging memoir by Hughes’s brother, Gerald, that the young boy had a tom-tom hidden in the local woods on which he would happily bash away. Eliot was giving the Charles Eliot Norton ...”

“... in their immediate, literal forms that an education is being identified. Similarly Joyce’s savage parody in Ulysses of the Apostles’ Creed as it might unofficially sound for the English requires us only to remember the echo of what it’s not: They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth and in Jacky Tar, the son of a ...”

“... and shot by a firing squad, two at a time. There were five British victims: four Gibraltarians and Robert Boyd, a young Irish officer of the Bengal Army who’d put up most of the cash, hoping for a glamorous alternative to service in India as a grandee in Torrijos’s Spain. He was better treated, though, than Lorca would be. The Spanish government allowed ...”

“... his essays would of course relax the link Johnson meant to tighten between faith and conduct. As Robert Voitle has suggested, Johnson was abundantly conscious of his responsibilities as a public instructor, and would have felt obliged to promote traditional doctrines. Johnson himself denounced teachers who betray weak minds into ‘doubts and distrust’, or ...”

“... to an occasional session of sweet silent thought, or even to the consulting of a concordance. Robert Browning, Luria, 1846 – I dedicate this last attempt for the present at Dramatic Poetry to a Great Dramatic Poet: ‘Wishing what I write may be read by his light’: if a phrase originally addressed, by not the least worthy of his contemporaries, to ...”

“... his nonsense about cannibals in Australia. In much the same class was his contemporary, A. Henry Savage Landor, grandson of the poet. As a boy he half-hanged himself, which, as Keay remarks, was excellent training for being towed by the throat behind Tibetan ponies. Worse things than that supposedly happened to him in the Himalayas, where he ‘took to heart ...”

“... millenarian preachers among them) that 1857 marked the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, when Robert Clive asserted East India Company ascendancy in Bengal. In the event, it was gun cartridges that set the mutiny off: they were greased, the sepoys believed, with a blend of cow and pig fat, which would defile both Hindus and Muslims when they bit the ends ...”

“... a more damaging charge – especially since it was linked to the somewhat improbable vision of Dr Robert Runcie, as a spider at the centre of a web of intrigue, still manipulating everything his own way. But the question, of course, is not whether what Dr Bennett wrote was wounding or damaging: it is whether or not it is true. Has the Church, in fact, in ...”

“... chancers from elsewhere in the Arab world arriving to offer their professional services. Munif’s savage and surreal satires of the suddenly rich royal family led to his Saudi nationality being revoked and to exile, first in Baghdad and then in Damascus. When he died in 2004, his widow rejected the posthumous honours (including loadsamoney) offered by Riyadh ...”

“... better than Alfred Wallis down in Cornwall, or at least he’s just as good, a bit different, less savage. Wallis was taken up by Hepworth and Nicholson and all the St Ives lot, but Craske’s been ignored.’ He proves an elusive subject. His life was almost entirely uneventful. Blackburn explains that he ‘was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just ...”

“... unsettling, as well as backward. James Frazer insisted that ‘the peasant remains a pagan and a savage at heart.’ Yeats said much the same but more politely: ‘Educated Ireland … does not understand how the old religion, which made of the coming and going of the greenness of the woods and the fruitfulness of the fields a part of its worship, lives side ...”