“... slumbers fall, thoughts sit, and all turn finally into lullaby. It sounds a familiar tune – William Strode could turn it out by the yard (‘Oh Lull me, lull me charming ayre,/My sences rocke with wonder sweete,/like snow on wooll thy fallings are’) – yet its delicacy is unmistakable. The chief reason critical taste has for so long been dead to the ...”

“... operator – actually his mother (played by Lansbury), the wife of the McCarthyite Senator Iselin (James Gregory) – Shaw is set to assassinate the Presidential appointee at Madison Square Garden, clearing the way for her husband’s ascendancy. The film doesn’t give much of an explanation – the book is no better – for the Lansbury character’s embrace ...”

“... the orthodoxy (it is made by last year’s Nobel laureates in economics, Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson, in their book Why Nations Fail). But less so than a few decades ago; it has for some time been under siege. Mariana Mazzucato points out in The Entrepreneurial State (2011) that many of the most important recent technologies – including the ...”

“... sense, though, Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton ...”

“... of blood, the subject of Yeats’s poem ‘The Rose Tree’ (1920), in which Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, leading figures in the 1916 Dublin Rising, concur that ‘nothing but our own red blood/Can make a right Rose Tree.’ (Pearse had declared that it would take ‘the blood of the sons of Ireland to redeem Ireland’.) Yeats said in this same diary ...”

“... Waterloo Bridge and the Adelphi. The destruction of the Adelphi was deemed ‘inevitable’ by the William Morris scholar John Drinkwater, as though to oppose it would be derisive of the common mood. Robert Byron, less precious than usual, regretted that ‘according to official and ecclesiastical standards … a bit of the old Roman wall is of more importance ...”

“... sectarian theories and practices.The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics ...”

“... we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to fight’ in Iraq. I heard him say: ‘You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. I like brawling.’ I heard that Donald Rumsfeld had created his own intelligence agency, the Strategic Support Branch, ‘designed to operate ...”

“... against him greater than those which, a century and a half later, confronted the invading force of William of Orange? Might it not have been Pole, instead of William, whom posterity recognised as the liberator of England and the preserver of its established religion? In the event, Pole would not return to England until the ...”

“... nervous illnesses which Richard Greaves unhelpfully approaches by means of psychiatric theory and William Styron’s compelling account of his own severe depression. In 1650 Bunyan had heard three or four women discussing religion: they were, he said, ‘far above out of my reach’, and he began seeking out the company of these people, who were members of a ...”

“... a form of apologetics). Yet the effort to exempt from the category of gay literature the novels of William Burroughs and Jean Genet or the poetry of Allen Ginsberg or James Merrill simply because these works are superior, serious and consecrated is a rearguard action designed to trivialise the label ‘gay art’. It is also ...”

“... permission for this and fingers those notorious reactionaries and outspoken Dyer supporters, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, and Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, then war secretary, but he can find no trace of the necessary arrangements in the papers of either ‘Jix’ or ‘Worthy’, suggesting that even they felt the need to conceal what they ...”

“... folding later in the week. On her day off, Rebecca scrubbed dirt from the clothes of her husband, James, and their three children. The family lived not far from the Roman Baths and close to the River Avon, but there was no direct water supply to the last house on Back Street Place.Rebecca wanted her daughter Rose to have a different life and sent her to ...”

“... Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up Cavendish’s World’s Olio was probably the philologist Thomas Jefferson Conant. A Louisville china ...”

“... standard edition of his prose writings, but we now have the full run in a distinguished edition by James Woolley. It is now possible, without visiting rare book libraries, to read the essays of both men in their original context, with their relation to one another in clear view. Sheridan’s (hopelessly inferior) essays help to throw light on Swift’s ...”