“... comparisons and so doesn’t reflect on the fact that in 1914 the British polity was much more stable than the French, German, Italian or Russian. And, contrary to his view, few voters were much concerned with either imperialism or Ulster per se, though both issues had sometimes been used as proxies for the patriotic defence of national strength – a ...”

“... session – in the peculiar political calendar of the 19th century, a Congress did not meet until more than a year after it was elected – and for several months he had a free hand in developing Reconstruction policy. He seized the opportunity to set up new governments in the South controlled entirely by whites. These abolished slavery – they had no choice ...”

“... Parts I and II of the total scheme, and a substantial portion of Part III. Musil later gave 20 more chapters of Part III to the printers and revised them in galleys but then withdrew them. Burton Pike, an eminent Musil scholar and the translator of this material into English, nicely says these chapters ‘were intended to continue’ Part III ‘but not ...”

“... year or so tossing a new stumbling-block into the path of those who would like to understand them. Thomas Hardy was England’s worst offender in this regard: but Graham Greene, now 80, bids fair to give Hardy a run for his money. Not in quality, of course. Even Greene’s most enthusiastic advocates wouldn’t attempt to place him in the top rank of English ...”

“... or out-of-doors)’; on Ed Dorn’s magical misspellings, which are sometimes ‘exhuberant’ and more often ‘queezy’, but which can pack a portmanteau which is worth the carriage, as in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his ...”

“... book on Some Religious Elements in English Literature and a biography of Milton. Like her ancestor Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose History of England was intended to appeal to the common reader (and particularly to women), she disliked intellectual snobbery. In ‘Parties’ she surveys the foibles of the literary world represented at a gathering: the ...”

“... of verse tales told by the passengers on a transatlantic steamer, Mari Magno; and a welter of more or less polished lyrics. But the mythology of failure persisted and Clough found himself transmitted to posterity as a minor moon in Arnold’s orbit, a useful illustration of everything his friend thought amiss with modernity – its absence of heroic ...”

“... many voices. Much like his Canterbury pilgrims, he is always en route but never arriving. We have more contemporary documents that mention Chaucer than any other premodern poet: 493 of them, meticulously compiled by Martin Crow and Clair Olson in Chaucer Life Records (1966). What they record is the career of a competent civil servant. A member of the king’s ...”

“... troops to Basingstoke. This had been the first major assault on Basing House, but there would be more.The site of the Tudor palace had been a locus of human activity and power since the Stone Age. A timber fortress stood there, on the banks of the River Loddon with views across the valley, from the 12th century until 1531, when Henry VIII granted William ...”

“... epidemics because, even in the short run, endemic illnesses kill, disable and make wretched many more human beings than the more spectacular epidemics with their abundance of bizarre incidents and accessible evidence. Rather than merely recount the course of an epidemic, the new historians try to encompass the ...”

“... It all contributes to the image of a local artist painting agreeable scenes. Those who have looked more closely at his work have seen more in it, but disagree about what the more is. Roger Fry admired the energy of the sketches, the aspect of Constable that flatters posterity by seeming to ...”

“... Camus and Sartre. Walser, drawn to balloon rides and flights of fancy, pretended to no such heft; Thomas Mann referred to him as a ‘clever child’. When Sontag situated Walser as ‘the missing link between Kleist and Kafka’, however, she was gesturing towards an outlaw tradition running alongside, and frequently in resistance to, the ...”

“... Punch, ‘thus introducing civilisation to Egypt’. The Egyptians put up with this sort of thing. Thomas Holloway, the great pill-maker, is supposed to have introduced eupepsia to Egypt by advertising his product from the same vantage-point. Punch at least seems to have established a lasting reputation along the Nile, because it was by those shores that the ...”

“... between defiance and misgiving. In 1810 Shelley went to Oxford, where he met and beguiled Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and languished over his rejection by his cousin Harriet Grove, who was frightened by the unorthodoxy of his ideas; he was soon sent down for co-authoring, with Hogg, ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ (though he wavered about acknowledging his ...”

“... happen next. Although the overt narrative proper to illustration will eventually be replaced by more enigmatic evocations of place, Hopper would go on making you wonder what has happened – or will happen. They are among the best prints made in the 20th century. Edward Hopper, ‘Night on the El Train’ (1918) The Hopper etchings are a late instance ...”