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“... it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the ...”

“... one of the most remarkable and affecting documentary legacies of the English past. The papers of William Clarke, a secretary in the Cromwellian Army, contain his transcript of the meetings at Army headquarters in late October and early November 1647 which posterity knows as the Putney Debates. The officers, soldiers and Levellers who debated the ...”

“... phase are situated in Cambridge, Otago, Keele, London, Middlesex and Cardiff. The doyen of them, William Cornish, has a distinguished record both as a legal historian – his and Geoffrey Clark’s Law and Society in England 1750-1950 remains an important work – and as an authority on intellectual property, on which he contributes an excellent section ...”

“... its weaponry. ‘Do we want to see Hitler in Independence Hall making fun of the Liberty Bell?’ William Bullitt, Roosevelt’s ambassador to France, asked a year before Pearl Harbor. US war planners were already envisioning the utopia to come. Its premise was the defeat of Germany and Japan, but also the break-up of European empires into a world of discrete ...”

“... Edith Swan-Neck, mother of his children. This piece, by the Anglo-German sculptor Charles Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by the syphilis of ...”

“... that determine character began to turn into slightly better grounded talk about nerves and brains. William Harvey discovered how the blood circulates in the human body. There was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of ...”

“... in which the British saw themselves is not particularly surprising. Nor is his tracing of a broad shift from early enthusiasm, through a period of intense vilification in 1808-15 (when British soldiers were fighting the French in Iberia), to the final phase of widely shared sympathy. Semmel makes a good case for the fractured and anxious nature of early ...”

“... have lived since 1910. Again and again, he argues that ‘19th-century anti-sensualism had a very broad base,’ that it consisted of ‘a set of widely held values which commanded wide assent’ and that it was ‘a widely and warmly embraced creed’. He accepts that prudery was ‘a real phenomenon’, notably among middle-class groups, where verbal and ...”

“... ideas accumulate into a body of positive philosophy. His philosophy is practical, realistic, broad-ranging, subtle. It is equipped to destroy errors, but it is not purely reactionary. Although Medawar nowhere states his philosophy as a whole, it does exist, and can be gathered together and expressed. Medawar accepts what he (and others) call the ...”

“... without a summer’ – Shelley and Mary Godwin (they married six months later), their infant son, William, and Godwin’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, were staying at a house on the shore of Lake Geneva. Byron and Polidori were up the hill at the Villa Diodati. During what Richard Holmes in his biography of Shelley calls ‘a spell of bad weather in the last ...”

“... ads and resumés posted online (these have been collected over the years by a journalist called William Arkin, who has written several books on American secrecy and maintains a useful blog). It’s been a feature of the coverage that the magic of the words has been used to stand for a generalised assertion of continuous mass surveillance. On 29 September ...”

“... philosophers continued to oppose tea on grounds of its stimulating and anti-soporific effects – William Buchan thought that tea was to be avoided in cases of melancholy and flatulence – but an expert consensus in its favour emerged. To the extent that tea was understood as a drug, it was generally judged a good one, repressing ‘vapours’, calming the ...”

“... in the Oxford Union. The man who in old age was to be both revered and mocked as the People’s William started out with the firm conviction that ‘the majority will be in the wrong.’ And the startling steps by which he found himself among the Liberals were interpreted by many of his associates not as a journey of honest discovery but as timeserving in ...”

“... palpable by the end of Victoria’s reign. That is the framework of a book whose merits are its broad scope and vivid detail rather than cogent argument. This is to be expected, perhaps, once Hunt has warned us that he will concentrate on ideas. ‘Too much recent urban history,’ he says, ‘has retreated into a tale of bureaucratic development – of ...”

“... purposive, energetic-sounding verb ‘moved into’, is meaningless unless it is explained that William Golding’s The Paper Men was a late, and lame, novel of remarkable thinness by an old famous author about being a famous author. It was metafictional only in the way that reality TV is metatelevisual. Stevenson never reflects on a writer’s aesthetic ...”