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“... English grammars were even, one might think self-defeatingly, written in Latin). William Lily’s Latin grammar, taught by royal decree in every English school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and ...”

“... by political disagreements, Taylor, a known and convinced Tory and devotee of the prime minister, William Pitt, managed to remain on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true ...”

“... terms. If you read his fiction as a whole, these repetitions become very clear: not just the broad scenarios and preoccupations, but the small touches – a character biting his fist in misery; badly applied lipstick; grease on the face. His ability to invest even these relatively innocuous things with a tinge of primal horror is quite startling. But the ...”

“... Audenesque pastoral airmen, urban gay camp, Shakespearean aristocrats-in-the-woods and what William Empson called the child-as-swain: TWO SHEPHERDS: We love the country, that’s why we’re handsome, it’s love love love love love. We only quarrel over sheep. We’re terribly natural, aren’t we? Well, is the sky blue? What did you expect, a couple ...”

“... I come across a note of when Mary-Kay and her children, Sam and Will, came round to supper. ‘William in particular is very polite, manfully tackling a stew which he doesn’t like and finishing it. “Thank you very much,” he says as he gets up. “I actually prefer my vegetables raw.” He also talks of Leonora da Vinzi and lists his inventions: the ...”

“... was far too small (four hundred delegates nevertheless squeezed in, Keir Hardie, Eleanor Marx and William Morris among them). The translating was shambolic, the resolutions so badly drafted that there was a tremendous row when it came to settling on 1 May as International Workers’ Day. Yet at the end there was a tremendous cheer for the symbolic handshake ...”

“... us with faith in aesthetic immediacy. In making this argument, Steiner is falling in with a broad array of contemporary artists and thinkers. He enlists the Modernists Braque and Wittgenstein in his epigraphs, but his criticism of art for art’s sake, aesthetic narcissism, and the sterility of Modernist formalism, links him more closely to ...”

“... work whilst men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes. It is a prospect to make William Morris’s mind reel, publishers quail. But who are, or were, the Khazars? ‘An autonomous and powerful tribe, a warlike and nomadic people who appeared from the East at an unknown date, driven by a scorching silence, and who, from the seventh to the ...”

“... a pragmatist who saw war as the test of manhood, and when Benda drew dubious comparisons between William James’s ‘will to believe’ and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’. Yet at the time Benda’s book appeared, the pragmatic philosopher John Dewey was advocating pacifism and renouncing the nationalistic illusions that had led him to support America’s ...”

“... rises to the challenge admirably, sensitively balancing his subject’s idiosyncrasy against his broad representative character. Monty’s codicological studies are outlined but not examined, since that task has been definitively carried out by R.W. Pfaff of the University of North Carolina. Nor, although he devotes a chapter to them, has Mr Cox a great deal ...”

“... committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke) with substantial Puritan affiliations. He himself must have been aware that the public theatres had enemies – and supporters – in both the Puritan and Anglican camps. Miss Heinemann sets out to distinguish Puritan ...”

“... or snow-shoes, they rubbed their hands, they bellowed at one another and lit cigars, they escorted broad-hipped women. Pensioners, they were on a seasonable outing to a place where all or any of them might have served as licensed murderers. As part of an attempt to ‘reach the mystery of German behaviour in the Hitler period’ this doesn’t promise ...”

“... it was natural for Haig to suppose that he would be the one to take the weight of the world on his broad shoulders. The trouble was that the Reagan concept of the Presidency involved the total management of his time, and of access to him, by a small group of trusted advisers, whose notion of Presidential priority for domestic affairs did not include the idea ...”

“... that is, it was (English) national rather than merely metropolitan – imbued with the spirit of William Morris, enthusiastic for the new idea of a decentralising, anti-statist, bottom-up Guild Socialism. Ironically, various New Age luminaries, notably G.D.H. Cole, became some of the Statesman’s most prolific and influential contributors. Indeed the New ...”

“... of the mid-Forties got the Third Programme right straight off. The BBC’s Director-General, William Haley, credited himself with having created the network by two decisions. Programmes should take as long as they needed to, and not be curtailed to make way for, say, a fixed news bulletin. Schedulers were urged to be as creative as they liked with an ...”