“... them Kempe, the 12th-century poet Marie de France and the sublime Julian of Norwich – others may lurk behind the anonymous female-voiced lyrics in Old and Middle English. Wellesley devotes a few intriguing pages to a 15th-century Welsh-language poet, Gwerful Mechain, whose diverse oeuvre ranges from religious verses to an ‘Ode to the Vagina’ and a ...”

“... than befitted his years or the occasion,’ John Galt thought, and Hazlitt agreed: ‘He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion.’ Gilmour is nearer the mark to see in Byron’s touchiness and bumptiousness not the toff reverting to type, but rather a flickering unease about his fitness for the ...”

“... with them as daily realities. The ‘liberation’ which shapes history as defined by the CCP may not have been recognisable to those who were being ...”

“... holds up once more ‘the convex glass’ of criticism in which the present age, like George IV, may see a reflection less than wholly ...”

“... more women had become authors: ‘Although the degree of control a husband exerted over his wife may not actually have been greater in the 18th century than during the early 17th century or the Restoration, the addition of the woman’s point of view on the subject … imparted to the discourse on marriage a new sense of crisis and individual ...”

“... No more wine? Then we’ll push back chairs and talk. A final glass for me, though. You may find a minor Byron here and there in Hunt, but that is the nearest you’ll get to the great Romantic poet proposed by Roe. In writing about the ‘first life’ of his subtitle, the life that ended with Shelley’s drowning the year after Keats was killed by ...”

“... licence plate: YE GEEKE).’ Like all good satirists, Coupland loves his targets. This passage may be a critique of the interdependence between personal style and corporate branding, but its cacophony of signs also says: enjoy! Yet always, until now, Coupland has held onto a distinction between his own writing and the texts consumed and produced by his ...”

“... he joined the abortive crusade of Humbert, Dauphin of Vienne; it has been suggested that it may have been on this expedition, somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, that he acquired the famous shroud. He had by this time already made a martial name for himself, and in 1346, after the French defeat at Crécy (a battle he was lucky to miss), he was taken ...”

“... day, sweet when asleep.’ I have a fear that an unhealthy sweetness, a corn-syrupy sweetness, may be beginning to appear in Zagajewski’s work, perhaps brought on by so much time in the US, where most of his livelihood and reputation is won. I fear poetry as a sort of preserve, praise for the sake of praise, and lushness for the love of lushness. As with ...”

“... bloody fool alive’. Surprisingly, Faber never considers the possibility that, while Amery may not have thought of himself as Jewish, he was almost certainly the object of anti-semitism. He quotes a long tirade against him by Wickham Steed, later editor of the Times – for whom Amery was an untrustworthy little Jew without ‘a drop of English blood ...”

“... take himself too seriously, and such excurses are mercifully brief, as is the book itself. ‘This may be the first short book on Napoleon,’ he comments (almost – Felix Markham’s classic 1954 Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe is even shorter). The problem is not that Martin occasionally loses himself in silliness, but that, like most of the ...”

“... visitors coped with their problem is another. Prince Albert, a driving force of the Exhibition, may not have known that the rage for newfangled water closets was flooding the drains and cesspools, causing dire contamination to London’s drinking water. This aspect of progress does not sully the pages of Auerbach’s book, though he tells us that Prince ...”

“... The vast majority of us who do not come from the intellectual, or any other, aristocracy may have good reason to be grateful that this is now an open question, and we can only celebrate the fact that fellowships and chairs (at Oxbridge or anywhere) are no longer presumed to belong, as if by inheritance, to the Darwins and Trevelyans of this ...”

“... himself personally warm and privately tolerant. Nonetheless, the story of ‘the two majors’ may be worth telling. They were a couple of odd characters who crossed Cripps’s path when he went to Delhi in 1946, to seek a settlement in India on behalf of the British Cabinet. Most of his links were with the Hindu-dominated Congress, so he tried to ...”

“... fingers go blind and are blest has an uncanny mythic resonance. Though some of its significance may be obscure (the ‘keys’ are also probably sycamore keys, the seeds of one of Watkins’s recurring symbols), the poem’s punnings allow Watkins’s day job into his verse, for once, evoking silent speech in the files of the dead. Ballad of the Mari Lwyd ...”