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“... is still possible to argue, the finest of their period. Auden’s scrupulous editor and executor, Edward Mendelson, has invariably respected and supported the poet’s decisions, but manages to have it both ways by including in a separate volume, The English Auden, the original versions of poems that were later either revised or rejected. This expensive ...”

“... the scope of man’s intellect’, and politely fending off horrifying tributes like Edward Aveling’s attempt to dedicate to him a collection of evolution articles from the National Reformer, destined to appear in the ‘International Library of Science and Free-thought’ under the lively editorship of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. The ...”

“... pre-ordained republican assertion of independence from the British oppressor, much the same can be said of the revisionist school of Irish historians, as Alvin Jackson’s judicious essay on the historiography of Home Rule brings out. It thus becomes apparent as one reads this book that the device of focusing on the contingent nature of events serves to ...”

“... or turned away, they seem to look past the viewer at something outside the frame. Shapton has said that the format of Guestbook was inspired by the illustrated volumes compiled by Victorian spirit investigators (she wanted to capture ‘the mix of proof, shock and totally crappy images’) and the photos are alluring because of what they don’t show ...”

“... been commissioned by Harold Wilson in 1969, to head off the Scottish nationalists. At the time, Edward Heath was already proposing a Scottish Assembly, but the arrival of Margaret Thatcher on the scene decisively quenched the feeble flicker of devolutionary spirit in the Tory Party. In the event, both Wilson and Thatcher agreed with Kilbrandon, that – in ...”

“... Clive were enrolled in the pantheon of imperial greatness. The statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston, toppled last year, was put up in 1895, though he died in 1721. But the strategy was a failure: more people learned about Colston in the 24 hours after his statue fell than in the 125 years it stood in Bristol city centre. In south Mumbai, the ...”

“... fire and floods, killed between thirty and sixty thousand people. The disaster, all the preachers said, was God’s punishment for sinfulness. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw it as divine vengeance for the cruelties of the Portuguese Inquisition. He had identified a minor earthquake near a racecourse in Yorkshire as another such intervention: God ...”

“... humanities appointment in Scotland: the chair in moral philosophy at Edinburgh. It has to be said, however, that Professor Wilson was an even more fictitious character than Christopher North. His appointment was a political one, and Wilson remained indebted, throughout his academic career, to the silent assistance of Alexander Blair, an old college ...”

“... aggressor and none of his neighbours, or his neighbours’ powerful friends, believed him when he said he had put away his weapons for good. Puffing on his pipe, the older man offered reassurance. Many years ago he was known as the most dangerous man in his neighbourhood, yet now everyone thought of him as harmless. Several months have passed since tea and ...”

“... the perfect opportunity for those jarring random encounters with people you don’t know that are said to characterise life in the big city. As Bernard puts it, ‘the elevator cab – in the days of Poe and Baudelaire just beginning to be installed in the grand hotels, by the time of Simmel and Benjamin a permanent part of urban architecture – is the ...”

“... came from a distinguished Boston family. William James introduced the pair and became one of Edward Estlin’s godfathers. As well as the grand house at 104 Irving Street where he was born, Cummings’s family had a summer house in New Hampshire, which he would enjoy until the end of life. He died there in 1962 of a brain haemorrhage while cutting ...”

“... the first time, linked with ancient texts on ‘uterine suffocation’, as we see most notably in Edward Jorden’s anti-Puritan tract, A briefe discourse of a disease called the suffocation of the Mother (1603). Here, hysteria is possession de-demonised with the help of Hippocrates’ gynaecological theories. If it is indeed true that hysteria comes into ...”

“... moved towards an enlightened pluralism – ‘I pursued … a slightly rebellious policy,’ he said in a radio interview that same year. Ogilvie describes such statements as ‘self-promotion’. ‘This is not to ascribe mendacity to Burchfield,’ she insists, yet ‘his claims for what he had done … simply were not true.’ She is not accusing him of ...”

“... behalf distant wars are ostensibly being fought? How normal are the normal lives these wars are said to be protecting? What feeling, if any, is there for those suffering human beings who are not our friends, relatives or fellow citizens? And how do the media stimulate or repress such feelings? After the photos of the fire-bombing of retreating Iraqi columns ...”

“... an English poet verges on the inaccurate so far as language is concerned. Ardis Butterfield once said on Radio 4’s In Our Time that he was in effect speaking French in English; and at a recent conference Elizabeth Archibald suggested that he was writing macaronics – those poems that combine two or more languages within a single verse form – only in a ...”