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“... The Outlaws of Medieval England by Maurice Keen, a delightful collection of Rymes of Robin Hood by Barry Dobson and John Taylor, and a constructive reassessment of ‘the birth and setting of the ballads of Robin Hood’ by John Maddicott, have not only cast a flood of light on the origins and significance of the legend, but also materially extended knowledge ...”

“... mourners gather: from brave wife to Neanderthal uncle-in-law, from plain-speaking Cousin Essie to Barry Shuskin the cryonics bore. Cryonics: that is the tip-off. In one view of the world, Henry might die and go to heaven. In Barry Shuskin’s view of the world, Henry might ‘die’, spend a purgatorial period in an ...”

“... in the presence of the husband of the monarch in a centre of metropolitan science. If – in Joseph Priestley’s over-quoted phrase – the rotten English hierarchy had ‘equal reason to tremble even at an air pump’, these shudders might be stilled by a spark coil or a Faraday cage. Despite this, Faraday was not a Tory. Throughout his career he took ...”

“... patrons to help him climb the ladder, and succeeded in gaining the favour of the wealthy financier Joseph Pâris-Duverney, himself a parvenu of no mean accomplishment. But the relationship ended with Pâris-Duverney’s death in 1770, and a legal challenge from the man’s family thwarted Beaumarchais’s expectation of a large legacy. With no other powerful ...”

“... it.Chanan is an intellectual, and his ruminations on the meaning of his story are always sensible. Joseph Lanza despises intellectuals and has no more interest in being sensible than he has a talent for it. Elevator Music, subtitled ‘A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong’, is a dotty book, a tireless and tiring panegyric to musical ...”

“... or ‘The Coldness’ deserve to be in anybody’s anthology. Without Silkin, but also without Barry MacSweeney or Douglas Oliver – whose Penniless Politics and The Infant and The Pearl are uniquely ambitious meditations on the character of democracy – we feel that somewhere along the line we have been short-changed. Anthony Conran’s marvellous poem ...”

“... religions and so no better than it should be. Hamilton led the way by writing a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, the Secretary of the Dilettanti, in which he described the curious rites still extant at Isernia in Southern Italy, where a festival in honour of the saints Cosmus and Damianus culminated in a church service to bless an organ euphemistically known ...”

“... attending consistently and unremittingly to his duties’. Some were more assiduous than others. Joseph Hume, MP first for Aberdeen then for Middlesex, spoke more than 4000 times in 12 years. Sir John Dashwood King, who sat for Chipping Wycombe, never once opened his mouth in a parliamentary career three times as long. It’s no surprise to come across some ...”

“... a brilliant, still flourishing generation of analytically enlightened sketch-scholars (Alan Tyson, Joseph Kerman, Douglas Johnson, Robert Winter, William Kinderman, Barry Cooper) is to such venal misprisions a corrective of which the beleaguered Beethoven may have hardly dared to ...”

“... of the beach through which the first gaggle of British colonists looked for the natives who Sir Joseph Banks, urging the settlement, had said would not pose much of a problem. That line, across which black Australia stared back, was a threshold between visibility and invisibility: the Eora could see the First Fleeters, but the First Fleeters, peering into ...”

“... military expenditure is echoed by some prominent US economists in relation to their own country. Joseph Stiglitz (a Corbyn adviser on the economy) and Linda Bilmes have argued that America’s spending on wars since 2003, estimated now at nearly $8 trillion, is crippling the country. ‘A trillion dollars,’ they note, could have built eight million ...”

“... chap is the same fluent character we see on the big screen.) When talking about the films of Joseph Mankiewicz and Preston Sturges, both of whom she admires – two more testaments to her acumen – DiBattista is obliged to concede in each case that the writer-director is the shaping spirit. But in most other cases you would swear she believed that the ...”

“... sunk and scrambled by their numbers and their confusion. In Media Critique in the Age of Gillray, Joseph Monteyne suggests that the spirit of ‘iconoclastic destruction’ in Gillray’s art-historical mock epics ended by ‘dramatically revealing Gillray’s own creative satirical dynamism’. That seems an apt characterisation of his art more ...”

“... is always a terribly bad sign when people’s birthdays get to be celebrated, whether it be Nero, Joseph Stalin, Nelson Mandela or the Queen. But it is, above all, the Great Lie at the Centre. It demeans and corrupts our culture by commanding the worship of rank, not merit; of inheritance, not achievement. It makes people accept that sheer humbug is ...”

“... also the subject of one of the best critical essays of the last quarter-century, an explication by Joseph Brodsky). Auden, however, quickly came to dislike the poem – he had dropped the offending stanza by 1944 – principally on the grounds that it’s untrue to say that we must love one another or die, since even if we do love one another we’re all going ...”