“... other 19th-century radicals. The accompanying manifesto, signed by Alexander alone, conveyed the more expansive vision of political regeneration captured by his triumphant tour through Europe. The official treaty described the signatory princes as ‘fathers’ to their nations, followed by a rote injunction to duty and obedience among Christian ...”

“... Prince d’Amour’ for Christmas 1597). This is the set of ‘Cabalistical Verses’ prefaced to Thomas Coryate’s eccentric account of a European tour, Coryats Crudities Hastily gobled up in five Moneths of travell (1611), a book which, mock-patronised by Prince Henry, is introduced by laboriously facetious mock-encomiums from 56 poets, Donne and Jonson ...”

“... industrial communities even strengthened the language for a time. As the Welsh economist Brinley Thomas put it, ‘the unrighteous Mammon, in opening up the coalfields at such a pace, unwittingly gave the Welsh language a new lease of life, and Welsh Nonconformity a glorious high noon.’ There are still large numbers of Welsh-speakers in the ...”

“... vocabulary – which Erasmus demonstrated, in his most popular textbook, by compiling a list of more than a hundred elegant ways to say ‘thank you for your letter.’ They savoured the variety and distinctiveness of Latin styles, ancient and modern. Joseph Scaliger noted with amusement that his favourite pupil at the University of Leiden, Daniel ...”

“... of politics. The idea seems to be that morality is grander than politics, because it is more amenable to reason, for example, or has a longer use-by date; so the thing to do is to put politics on a firm moral footing. Consequently, political moralists pay little attention to the conditions in which philosophical texts emerge. This is in some ways ...”

“... he knew his literary career wouldn’t have taken off but for the patronage of Shaw and Edward Thomas; he also knew some thought him overrated, a ‘nature poet’ who had earned that tag by sleeping under hedges rather than the quality of his verse: I hear men say: ‘This Davies has no depth, He writes of birds, of staring cows and sheep, And throws no ...”

“... death in 1565 was the chief gentlewoman of Elizabeth’s privy chamber, and whom Elizabeth trusted more than any other woman. He was also related on his mother’s side to sailors and adventurers. Sir Humphrey Gilbert was his half-brother, and more distantly related were Arthur Gorges, a goodish poet who could also captain a ...”

“... that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House. It wasn’t much of a conversation though, more an exercise in mutual incomprehension and loathing, with entirely different campaigns being fought in the North and the South (where for the most part Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot). Dewey died in the summer of 1952, so the last election he was able to ...”

“... the two of them joking back and forth, when Berryman volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable’. For a long time afterwards, ‘in the most cosy and affectionate lover kind of talk … she was Mabel and I was Henry.’ Not long after that Berryman began to write ...”

“... had no representation). That same summer George IV died, leaving the throne to his marginally more stable brother William. The death of the king brought a general election, and the Tories were replaced by the Whigs. The chief difference between the two parties was that the Whigs were more sensitive to the growing wrath ...”

“... father’s side, were schoolmasters or Anglican clergymen. Whitehead’s own father was both. The Thomas Whitehead to whom the quatrain was attributed took over a derelict school called Chatham House in Ramsgate in 1810 and within ten years, according to Professor Lowe, ‘made it one of the best schools in England’. I do not know what led Lowe to believe ...”

“... begins by being about the mannequins, or lay figures, that artists often used as technical aids. More pliable, and more patient, than live models, many of them were also compelling and strange. A primitive lay figure once owned by Walter Sickert is stretched out on a sheet in a large cardboard coffin; it’s as though ...”

“... against Terror, which they painted in Morelia, Mexico in 1934.The third frame, which was not more than implied at the time San Clemente was painted, is that of American post-abstract figuration: not the cool, ironic Pop art figuration of Lichtenstein or Rosenquist, but the raw, scrawled attacks on pictorial propriety of, say, Schnabel and Basquiat, whose ...”

“... proverb is right, the translation I have just offered of the proverb itself must be just one more betrayal. Indeed, the case against me is strong. The Italian phrase gets much of its force from the jingling assonance of the two words, but one finds swiftly that it is no good trying to reproduce this with the weaker assonances available in ...”

“... reflections on the state and status of his subject illustrate the Coleridgean maxim that a man is more likely to be right in what he affirms than in what he denies. Arising from lectures delivered, one imagines, off the cuff to an audience at the University of Michigan, they consist for the most part of soundings-off against a rogues’ gallery of ideological ...”