“... and remained a champion.Purdy was born in Ohio in 1914, the second of three sons. His father, William, was a banker unwisely turned property developer. After William lost large sums of money, Purdy’s parents divorced, and his mother, Vera, began running a boarding house. Richard, his older brother, had a successful ...”

“... work to which Collinson supplies both a corrective interpretation and a sociological dimension – William Haller unblushingly declared himself concerned less ‘with the links that connect Puritanism with the past than with the ways which Puritanism marked out for the future’. By ‘the future’, Haller meant the Puritan Revolution. Collinson is interested ...”

“... was an early version of Hamlet, possibly by Kyd; a prototype Henry V, starring Dick Tarlton and William Knell. And, a little later, there were the first ventures of Ben Jonson – Hot Anger Soon Cooled, written with Thomas Dekker and Henry Porter, and Robert II, with Henry Chettle – now just bodiless titles in an old theatrical ledger. The case of Marlowe ...”

“... work, historians soon learned to remind themselves, was equally so of all the great books in that broad movement of political thought, from the Renaissance to the 18th century, in which Locke stands. In England the writings of the mid-Tudor resistance theorists, of Hobbes and the Civil War republicans, of Burke and Paine, were written in the hope of ...”

“... William Godwin is a man who cries out to be the subject of a life. He has everything: a repressed personality, ripe for psychoanalysis; a role in the high dramas of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, his son-in-law Shelley and the infant grandchildren; a circle of interesting friends, many of them articulate enough to leave written records, and famous enough to have their letters preserved ...”

“... fully described here, was entrusted to an Englishman familiar with Wren’s plans, the engineer William Lindley, who spoke German, and was at the time managing the construction of one of Germany’s earliest railway lines, close by the damaged city. Hamburg’s narrow streets were widened, partly to give fire less opportunity to spread, and new streets ...”

“... American fiction’. ‘Paranoid school’ doesn’t get you very far – Pynchon and Mailer, both broad-brush comparisons, were the other faculty members Towers had in mind – but there’s mileage in the notion of DeLillo as a shaman. ‘Fiction, at least as I write it and think of it,’ he told a reading group in 1995, ‘is a kind of religious meditation ...”

“... a pen sticking out of his breast pocket, wearing on his head, of all things, a trilby hat with a broad black band; lined up behind him are three messengers waiting to take his copy to the post office. The man is identified as the Reuters correspondent, J.W. Collins. The text tells us, though, that the Reuters correspondent in Abyssinia in 1935 was Major Jim ...”

“... verbal instructions) than with the issue of class. Josephson is right in saying that there was a broad moral and social agenda behind the ‘good taste’ of the transcriptions espoused by the Folk-Song Society (whose founding members included Victorian stalwarts like Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford) and the idea that folk-song was a ...”

“... then governing the slave refuge colony of Sierra Leone, Zachary, like his fellow abolitionist William Wilberforce, believed the spread of the Gospel was a much greater cause. Blacks should be free to serve their – that is, his – God, and to take their proper places in the hierarchy of humanity that the evangelicals saw as ‘natural’, and essential ...”

“... critics associated with the library of Alexandria in around the second century BC to describe a broad range of poems written to be sung either by solo voices or a chorus. Lyres were not compulsory, but music seems to have been, and so several kinds of poem which we would now include within our much broader conception of ‘lyric’, such as elegies and ...”

“... re-interpretation of the Cold War. But the new view of Eisenhower has been no less a part of the broad assault on mainstream liberalism than the new view of the Cold War, and no less infuriating to liberals. Eisenhower was widely scorned in the first decade after his retirement as a genial nonentity whose Administration slumbered through the ...”

“... had been allied to the Orange family since the marriage of Charles’s daughter Mary to the second William of Orange in 1641. William’s death in November 1650, which made possible two decades of republican rule in the Netherlands, was as large an event in Dutch politics as the execution of his father-in-law the previous ...”

“... bronzes and casts after the antique) but also on their own stocks of inspiration, or fantasia.This broad shift in outlook is well-known. What is surprising is how early its implications were grasped and articulated. Cennino Cennini’s Book of Art was written in Padua around 1400, probably with a humanist audience in mind. He dispensed a host of useful tips to ...”

“... the church’s ‘maladjusted economy’. They were the inventors of the analysis, beloved of William Tyndale and many early Protestants, that ‘Popery’ had grown up because it was for the profit of the clergy. It was this belief which enabled early Protestants, up to and including Jewel, to believe the mists of Popery would disperse before the clear ...”