“... any individual could singlehandedly precipitate a major shift in human thought. Adrian Desmond and James Moore place Darwin above Marx and Freud. It is hard to think of successors to that trinity of lone rangers in an age when research is financed by foundations and carried on by teams and generally mounted on the kind of scale where the capacity of execution ...”

“... compatriots. In Rome, Catholic priests formed part of the British colony, the genial Scot Peter Grant being ‘an agreeable companion to everybody’ and the Jesuit John Thorpe acting as an agent for the purchase of works of art. Father Thorpe commissioned paintings and furnishings for the chapel of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, a unique surviving complex of ...”

“... In 1956,​ James Sutherland, a professor of 18th-century literature, delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge on the subject of ‘English satire’. ‘In recent years,’ he announced, ‘there have been signs of an increased interest in satirical writing,’ but even he couldn’t have seen what was about to start unfolding in a year or two, on his very doorstep ...”

“... and began to enlist men and gather arms and supplies. He also purchased an interest in a huge land grant in Texas, then part of Spain’s North American empire. His activities were hardly secret; indeed they became the subject of much speculation in the press. Was Burr planning to detach part of the trans-Appalachian West from the US and create a new nation in ...”

“... the start, unionism had to gerrymander elections in order to ensure the maintenance of what Sir James Craig, who became the first prime minister of Northern Ireland in 1921, called ‘a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state’.Foster is a former solicitor who won a seat for the Ulster Unionist Party in 2003 and soon defected to the DUP, which ...”

“... to Nead: ‘The fogs of the 1950s were different … from the fogs of Conan Doyle and Henry James. They drew on the accumulated meanings of the Victorian fogs, but they were also distinctively modern.’ This is, at best, questionable, quasi-anthropomorphic, ascribing to fogs memory and mimetic capacities. Nead goes on to ...”

“... for the Presidency himself, but F.D.R. put him out of action by sending him to the Court of St James (where his semi-English airs and his ambivalence about fascism were not altogether unfashionable), and he had to be satisfied with passing on the ‘discipline of lust’ and the ‘cult of courage’ to his sons. With Joe Jr dead in the war, it was left to ...”

“... Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s. The City was estranged as a result of Royal attacks on municipal and corporate privileges which have long ...”

“... of such a life is chiefly of interest for the celebrities which it encountered. In 1966, Professor James Bertram brought out the New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold, which included all Clough’s longer ‘anti-podistic’ letters to his friend between 1847 and 1851: these had been omitted from F.L. Mulhauser’s Correspondence of A.H. Clough (1957). The New ...”

“... they expected to fight them in Texas as well. They probably didn’t realise, however, that their grant from the Mexican government had placed them deep in Comanchería, the area of the South-West controlled by the Comanches, or that the Mexicans intended to use the rapidly growing colonies of English-speaking settlers from the US (known as Anglos) to create ...”

“... elsewhere in the book) ‘the need for overstanding’. But for the moment-as-moment we can grant that Professor Booth has brought us face to face with the unknown, perhaps even the unknowable. After all, a poem is much more complicated than a cone in space. Professor Booth makes much of this cone. If an observer sees the cone from end on, he thinks it ...”

“... students for public school entrance. There were four kinds of secondary school: public, direct-grant (which received state funding from Whitehall on condition that they took a proportion of their pupils on scholarships), grammar and secondary modern. By this time Labour was committed to comprehensive education, having accepted the argument that the ...”

“... had never before met the editor of Blaze from Perth, and it was well-known that Sperm’s grant was cut because the editor of Blaze was having a really sick affair with a poetess whose last book Sperm had dumped on; the editor of Blaze, as everyone knows, was a big friend of X on the Queensland Arts Council ... and so on. It may be a big country, I ...”

“... ridiculous finds full expression. She hated writing them and only did so to please her publisher, Grant Richards, with whom, at the time, she was in love. The echoes of Wilde have gone, to be replaced by a celebration of frivolity and inconsequence even more extreme than his, which nonetheless seems to be more deeply rooted in reality. This is the tone of the ...”

“... copiously employed throughout the text: the use of portmanteau neologisms in the tradition that James Joyce took over from Humpty Dumpty. The effectiveness of the device is more limited than is often allowed: it’s an easy trick to learn, and while the odd hit in this mode attracts praise, who keeps a tally of the numerous misses? But what would seem ...”