“... of which were an old man, whose name was Prospero, and his daughter Miranda, a very beautiful young lady’ – and calls it ‘proto-Hemingway’; he also claims for her prose ‘the lean authority of the Bible’. In the all too rare moments when Wilson is lost for inspiration, he resorts to dropping in big words: scesis ...”

“... time that Defoe was travelling on the muddy highways and muddier byways of England and Scotland, a young poet, James Thomson (b. 1700), was roaming the cold hills of Scotland. Defoe, who toured through the area where James Thomson was born, thought little of it: agriculture in Roxburghshire was in a pitiful state, the people suffering a terrible famine from ...”

“... carefully crafted around an absence of fact; she describes, in a generic way, the upbringing of a young gentlewoman with a future at the Tudor court. Born Jane Parker, around 1505, she grew up, probably, on her father’s estates in Essex. Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly ...”

“... domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. In The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship (1987) and Urbanisation without Cities (1992), he proposed ‘libertarian municipalism’ as an ...”

“... about the links between the political and cultural histories of the USA during this period, but David Stowe, who teaches American Thought and Language at Michigan State University, is, to my knowledge, the first writer to have attempted a systematic history of the relationship between jazz and New Deal America. The most immediate impact of Roosevelt’s ...”

“... are social means of inducing us to take pleasure in the happiness of others. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson are clear that there are two notions of altruism, as well as two challenges to its possibility, stemming from quite different sources, but their wide-ranging book is intended to tackle both. They begin with biological altruism, offering their ...”

“... Tory gents quite unrepresentative of the masses who played the game. McKibbin recounts how the young Tom Graveney (a Player) dared to congratulate David Sheppard (a Gentleman) on his century, and even called him ‘David’. Basil Allen, the Gloucestershire captain, rounded on Graveney ...”

“... Catholicism was especially complicated. Since he hated the way that foreign monarchs exploited young Swiss men as mercenaries, he saw the pope as an ally against mercenary service; eventually, he accepted an annual pension from a grateful Vatican. Then came the moment in 1520 when this income became an embarrassment, because his struggle to find a new way ...”

“... only not to Kraus, who was ailing and depressed. Kraus wrote about Heine for the usual reasons young critics write about older authors: to kill the father, sleep with the mother muse, and be reborn. He linked Heine’s most limpid and lazy style – developed, in Kraus’s telling, during Heine’s precious self-imposed exile in Parisian salons – with ...”

“... beloved ‘the only disciple of philosophy among all the girls of our age’. Heloise? Abelard? David Luscombe, in his magisterial new edition of the canonical letters, is inclined to say no. Teachers of this era, he notes, commonly exchanged flirtatious letters with their female students; it was an accepted way of teaching Latin rhetoric. Yet the tone of ...”

“... as babies. There were, it seemed, patterns and cycles to disadvantage. Around the same time David Barker began to show the ways in which nutrition during pregnancy had long-lasting effects not just on babies’ growth, but also on their risk as adults of developing heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Barker argued that to improve the health of the next ...”

“... collection of the same title) called ‘One Arm’. It is about Oliver Winemiller, a magnificent young navy boxer who lost an arm in a car crash when he was 18, and whose life has subsequently gone to ruin. Working as a male hustler, he services thousands of men in cities throughout America. Eventually, he murders a wealthy client on his yacht, and is ...”

“... hour – and he hasn’t had a braver one since – it wasn’t all that brave: he was only a young member of the Illinois state legislature. Had he been on the Senate floor with Clinton, Kerry and Edwards he might not have been so bold. The other thing Obama is known for is his memoir, Dreams from My Father, which was first published in 1995, four years ...”

“... histories had a separate genesis, and were intended for a very different purpose. W.T. Couch, the young head of the University of North Carolina Press, and soon to be director of the FWP for the south-eastern region, wrote to Alsberg in April 1938 proposing that the Project record ‘life histories of tenant farmers and their families’. But he wasn’t ...”

“... the whole world more barbarous than that custom of these coasters in the west of England.’David Cressy, a historian of early modern Britain, wants to rescue these customs from such condescension. Coastal folk were not the immoral ‘wreckers’ of 18th-century myths, luring ships onto rocks with false lights; nor were they the proletarian heroes of ...”