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“... the reflection? In a new study of English popular religion based on ecclesiastical court records, Christopher Haigh finds that Dent’s four characters represent widely held attitudes. While Dent invented them as useful stereotypes, his book succeeded because people recognised them and the things he had them say. Court records and books like Dent’s can be ...”

“... him. Described by one 16th-century Spanish ambassador as blunt, uncourtly and dressed always in black, Walsingham has long defied categorisation. John Cooper’s book is a fresh attempt to assess the accuracy of these opposing images. It charts Walsingham’s life from his birth in 1531 or 1532, on the cusp of the Henrician Reformation and the break with ...”

“... understood culture according to a linguistic model, as a system of differences and oppositions (black/white, left/right, raw/cooked, whatever) to which individuals are subject, briefly represented a fashionable alternative in the 1960s, despite the anguished warning of one Communist intellectual that the theory would cause despair among the Renault workers ...”

“... in several editions with large print runs, but as usual demand exceeded supply, and the book’s black market value was almost thirty times its official price. Remarque’s Three Comrades, published in Russian in 1958, became ‘the novel – the Russian word roman can also mean “a love affair” – of a generation’, as one Soviet contemporary put ...”

“... and despite the solemn treatment of his terrors and coming of age, there’s more than a touch of black farce in the novel’s stage management, especially during the final catastrophe. Above all, the translated Yiddish dialogue is splendid: ‘almost too splendid’, according to Alfred Kazin, who wrote the introduction to a 1991 edition of the novel, since ...”

“... its history as ‘the pre-eminent sea-fighting force of the post-1500 world’, in the words of Christopher McKee, resonated still in school history books, comics and war films (Officer with mug: ‘Cocoa, sir?’ Officer with binoculars: ‘Good man, Number One!’). The most popular cigarette brands suggested that seagoing manliness and smoking were one ...”

“... to return to it,’ Neal Ascherson wrote in the Scottish political review Q in 1975. The historian Christopher Harvie described the emigrant intellectuals who pepper Scottish history as ‘red Scots’: ‘cosmopolitan, self-avowedly “enlightened” and, given a chance, authoritarian, expanding into and exploiting greater and more bountiful fields than their ...”

“... be meaningless. It could be one of the last ways of keeping a secret. Then, take the influence of black music, black history. Indeed, it is there, and Dylan has consistently addressed himself to the social fate of American blacks. But Mellers’s mythic-mindedness leads him to not even discuss ‘The Lonesome Death of ...”

“... it. A book appeared, with Edward’s conclusion. The rift was over. In 1986 we met in New York. Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, he and I had been brigaded to discuss agendas for radical history at the New School. In the overflowing auditorium, hanging on his words, he was die image of a romantic orator: his bursts of passionate speech punctuated by that ...”

“... experiencing of them, should have enjoyed elaborate articulation in recent years. Both Said and Christopher Norris mention aspects of this, but they’ve obviously missed an article in a theory journal which called for a comprehensive ‘taxonomy of literary experiences’, expressly designed as a sort of manual of textual intercourse, and intended ‘(like ...”

“... and told me things I didn’t know.’ She is a bit more specific about his clothes: his skintight black velvet ‘strides’, snakeskin boots, or for the beach, ‘snug little pale blue shorts, a chiffon flower-patterned shirt, unbuttoned’. Wells’s memoir has more to say about cheeses: ‘a soupy Reblochon and a gamey Epoisses’; ‘Brie … drooling ...”

“... of Antiquaries in London. Page after page of this history of Britain is covered with blocks of black ink that delete, or nearly delete, every appearance of the word ‘pope’, from Peter the First on. The deletions are meticulous and they read like controlled rage: a careful and unswerving attempt to erase a memory. They were made in the early years of ...”

“... Milton Friedman, the man for whom the British economy is now what St Paul’s was to Sir Christopher Wren: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Professor Friedman’s contribution, an extract from his book-of-the-(TV)-film, Free to Choose, is entitled ‘The tide is turning’. This was precisely the phrase he used, when I spoke with him recently, of ...”

“... and art historian – it is as a sympathetic critic of some of the quieter poets (Clare, Barnes, Christopher Smart) and an acrid critic of many others, including most of his contemporaries, that Grigson is first thought of. Not Mr Grigson the poet, his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, but Mr Grigson the critic, his eye beadily turned on pretension, inflation ...”

“... who, as an undergraduate, climbed onto the Codrington Library and stole the weather vane from the Christopher Wren sundial. When he was elected a fellow, he climbed back up and replaced it. Nobody, as far as he could tell, had noticed its absence.The world is huge up high. I’m not daring in most things – I cross roads at the green man and wear my seatbelt ...”