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“... bought off and agitators had difficulty rallying a following, but in the case of each one of five major drainage projects a complete cross-section of the community affected seems to have been mobilised. Sympathy for this opposition extended to local office-holders, resulting in the heavy-handed intervention of the central government. Moreover, resistance to ...”

“... their day. In many respects it wasn’t. The mindless trench warfare during the committee stage of major bills in which the opposition attempted to keep the government up all night is now a thing of the past, thanks in large part to an initiative taken by Tony Blair when he was Labour’s energy spokesman. Faced with a government bill to privatise the ...”

“... the accompanying turf wars that claim so many academic casualties. He has written biographies of John Winthrop, Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams and George Washington; political histories of the Stamp Act crisis and the causes of the American Revolution; social histories of family life in colonial New England and Virginia; intellectual histories of Puritan ...”

“... century who (quite wrongly, I think) has been declared the least élitist: Then Hardy, for many a major Poet, is for me just an old stager, Shuffling about a bogus heath, Cob-webbed with his Victorian breath. The lines will provoke more indulgent chuckles now than in 1970, when Thomas published them. For inside twenty years, with astonishing velocity, Hardy ...”

“... as a mere imitator. Richard Dana thought his ‘Marco Bozzaris’ was America’s best lyric poem. John Quincy Adams referred to one of his poems in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. Most inexplicable of all, on 15 May 1877, fifty thousand people gathered in Central Park to see President Hayes unveil a statue of Halleck in the so-called ...”

“... Curiously, the first historian to query this complacent picture was the future arch-Eurosceptic, John Redwood, in his Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750 (1976). This told the story of the assault on orthodox Christianity launched during the Augustan age by a variegated cast of libertine rakes, deists and heterodox ...”

“... the real-life Rochester, Alexander Larman provides a workmanlike account of an improvident life. John Wilmot was born in 1647 on All Fools’ Day. His father, one of Charles II’s most stalwart lieutenants, had fought for the king and fled the field with him after the royalist defeat at the battle of Worcester. The two men escaped together to Paris, where ...”

“... Gear, were the only ones among her critics who got her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the ...”

“... since Eliot and the leading poets (now dead) of my own Thirties generation, there have been no major poets, no “good” poets at all; and perhaps only six middling poets worth attending to – six poets in England (and as far as long or short sight tells me, fewer still in the United States).’ That every year new maggots make new flies is what ...”

“... their movies in parking lots or off of trucks until they are chased away by the police. The critic John Anderson who has written a book about Sundance calls it ‘a progressive event that recognises the right of every American to get her or his movie on-screen.’ And yet, as Andy Klein, another journalist, complains, Sundance is ‘about as useful’ for ...”

“... selling of securities caused prices to collapse. Between 20 and 30 July, the price of shares in major businesses fell dramatically: Canadian Pacific Railway and Rio Tinto Copper dropped 15 and 24 per cent respectively. With everyone looking to sell, and almost no one to buy, the market in securities evaporated. On Sunday, 26 July, the bourses in Vienna and ...”

“... who, over the years, have been enlightened enough to publish and keep in print the works of many major and minor modern poets (for which they should be saluted). The cost of permissions which this firm levies is so high as to make low-sale critical monographs unviable: indeed, as far as one can make out, Faber do not recognise fair dealing as applicable to ...”

“... ward off chaos. The military theme in his work fits into this picture. Like Ted Hughes, one of his major influences, Longley had a father who fought in the First World War and the imagery of the Somme – corpses, helmets, gas-masks – keeps on turning up in his Irish landscapes. Anyone who digs around Longley’s poems is liable to find well-preserved stone ...”

“... superintendent for Indian affairs’ in British North America; in addition, he served as a major general in charge of various military forces during the decade-long struggle known in the colonies as the French and Indian War (1754-63). His wealth and social standing grew in parallel to his political importance. He eventually owned some 170,000 acres, a ...”