“... most a verie small number of verie sillie and base people’. Admittedly, one of their leaders, Henry Barrow, was ‘a gentleman of a good howse’, but he had frequented the common eating-houses in London ‘and ther learned to argue in Table-talke’. Like Thomas Hobbes, whom he would later employ to accompany him on his walks and note down his thoughts ...”

“... series of spectacular scenic displays, including (in the words of the Examiner’s theatre critic Henry Morley) ‘splendid trains of courtiers’, ‘shining rows of vestal virgins’, ‘characters who appear to have stepped out of a Greek vase’ and a ‘Dioramic View of the Passage from Tharsus to Ephesus’ of such effect that ‘the whole theatre seems ...”

“... called ‘The Nose’.During these years, Escobar lived in the countryside, where he set up a power structure to rival that of the government. While a police chief in Bogotá might earn around $5000 a month, Vallejo observed, ‘the poor police of some villages in semi-jungle territories [could] earn between $20,000 and $50,000’ if they co-operated with ...”

“... his verse translation of and commentary on Book VI of the Aeneid (dedicated to James I’s son Henry), and his treatise on the succession to the Crown – we have a record of what an Elizabethan courtier wrote, and a sense of why he wrote, which is without parallel in its richness. Jason Scott-Warren’s marvellously detailed book on Harington brings this ...”

“... sense of merely odd, or strange, but weird as Shakespeare might have meant it: ‘having the power to control the fate or destiny of men’, ‘partaking or suggestive of the supernatural’ (OED). Weird, too, in the way that Tennyson meant it, particularly as the word appears in his poem ‘The Princess’. The visitor to Stockbridge is liable to feel ...”

“... a sequel, The Singing Flame, which is less accomplished but possesses much of the same drive and power. Always a stringent self-critic, he considered it unfinished, and it was not published until 1978, 21 years after his death. It deals with the Civil War and with his imprisonment, a period that saw the end of O’Malley’s career as an active ...”

“... politics it reacts to are Mrs Thatcher’s. So it’s lucky for McEwan that she was returned to power. The success of his novel depended on it. Iris Murdoch’s novels are never exposed to such risks and ironies. The reasons for this may partly explain why The Book and the Brotherhood will weather its bad timing better than The Child in Time its good. The ...”

“... by the end, to have conceived. I enjoyed his book, laughed often, was often touched by his power of compassion, found some descriptive passages memorable: but felt, after all, that his inventive capacity had only served to botch his argument. Mr Buchan is also highly inventive, but he, in Davy Chadwick, is a rigorous underteller, a demonstrator who ...”

“... close her mouth, or break from her. The blackmail story, which Fullerton related pathetically to Henry James as well as to Edith Wharton, his new mistress (or one of them), might, one thinks, have been all an interesting fiction to put a polite face on Fullerton’s lack of interest in committing himself elsewhere. Sherlock Holmes, following Arsène ...”

“... to Montrose’s much-reprinted article, ‘ “Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’, which opens with a quotation from the 1597 diary of the astrologer Simon Foreman, purporting to describe a dream about sexually mastering Queen Elizabeth. Montrose juxtaposes this with a contemporary letter from the French ...”

“... the beliefs and works of people such as Raja Rammohun Roy in Bengal in the early 19th century and Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, the Anglo-Portuguese poet and lecturer at the Hindu College, Calcutta, and his fervent Bengali followers. The metaphorical laboratory turned out to be the Indian middle classes. Bengal had the earliest printing presses in India; during ...”

“... Mies van der Rohe laid down by first-generation historians such as Pevsner, Sigfried Giedion, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock (Pevsner published Pioneers of the Modern Movement in 1936; Giedion Space, Time and Architecture in 1941; and Hitchcock The International Style: Architecture since 1922, with Philip Johnson, in 1932). Banham was distant enough in time and ...”

“... words, to ‘find the centre’, to share in the might and vertebration of a triumphant colonial power rather than live out palsied and prefabricated lives on marginal islands has been rehearsed so many times that it is now a commonplace. Yet their tales of being stranded between ‘expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse’ constitute by far the most ...”

“... the community, with a jealous and indignant eye, and impede his progress by every means in their power. It’s hard not to sympathise with this. The Spy, Hogg’s weekly journal, was forced to close after Edinburgh’s bluestockings convicted it of ‘coarseness’. (‘Everything nat’ral, and easy, and true, is ca’d coorse,’ he is made to say in one ...”

“... assumptions of possession and dispossession are everywhere, and full of intimations of class and power. ‘This language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine,’ Stephen Dedalus thinks while talking to an English priest in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The language isn’t the priest’s and isn’t Stephen’s, but the priest talks as ...”