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“... other novelists meditating on that inscrutable question, she comes up with answers that reveal more about her own convictions and aspirations than they do about the possible conditions of prehistory. The Temple of My Familiar is founded on an ancient utopia. Lissie recalls an immeasurably distant past when men and women lived apart, coming together only ...”

“... a company of Blunderers and Blockheads, and that there is a Commentator in the World, one Dr. B, more Learned, Accurate, Ingenious, Judicious and Illustrious than all of them put together. This representation of Bentley as a figure of overweening arrogance was one which I, like most students of English literature, was primed to accept. In The Dunciad in ...”

“... the 1590s, some of them very distinguished, and of their efforts to exclude one who would become more distinguished than any of them. Blackfriars is an area rich in Shakespearean associations, invisible but well attested. Down an alleyway running south off Carter Lane lies New Bell Yard. Now dominated by the glass-fronted atrium of the Grange St Paul’s ...”

“... to Thompson’s interest through the correspondence columns of the TLS. In the loft Thompson found more than a hundred boxes containing the Muggletonian archive, which Noakes, on a wartime journey to Covent Garden market, had rescued when the Muggletonian Reading Room in Bishopsgate was blitzed. These boxes have now found a home in the British Library as ...”

“... confidence to a state of society in which the different orders and classes of men will contribute more effectively to the support of each other than they have hitherto done.’ The essential structure of society, however, would remain unaltered: scientific progress would demonstrate more clearly than ever that ‘the ...”

“... idea that parents weren’t attached to their children touched a nerve among medievalists. More than thirty years ago, pioneering work by Shulamith Shahar and Barbara Hanawalt showed conclusively that Ariès was wrong. Not only did medieval people have a concept of childhood, adapting the sequential model of the ‘Ages of Man’ from classical ...”

“... citizen of a green and peaceful place, that made him conscious of impending doom? Nothing in his more or less idyllic childhood, his education at the Malin National School, his successful matriculation from the Franciscans at Gormanstown, his escape from university – first from Dublin, then from North London Polytechnic, and finally from Freiburg (where he ...”

“... rival – a defensive response to the threat of automation – but we come to see that Melania is more concerned by what Klara’s presence means for Josie. Klara at first assumes that her role is to keep Josie company, to keep her loneliness at bay, but it gradually appears that the Mother may have more sinister plans for ...”

“... must be understood as discursively produced.’ (Actually, I don’t think they do agree, but more about that later.) If we take the point, then the history of sexual knowledge becomes the history of the making of sexual knowledge’s objects. As such, it has a certain narrative coherence for Foucault but scarcely, if at all, for Hall and Porter. We learn ...”

“... for army officers, and the remaining 13 were given over to Army Other Ranks. In all, they listed more than 700,000 names. It was as if the Cenotaph in Whitehall and every war memorial on every village green had been compressed into a few cubic feet of paper and ink. The death of my great-great-grandfather, my mother’s mother’s father’s father, a year ...”

“... that had come about since their last sojourn. In 1292, in Shropshire, Alice Knotte complained that Thomas Champeneys ‘detaineth from her seven shillings in money and a surcoat of the value of three shillings’. ‘Alice can get no justice at all,’ she protested, ‘seeing that she is poor and that this Thomas is ...”

“... at the ways the world might be changed by the microcomputer revolution. The BBC responded with a more practically minded, educational series called The Computer Programme – a terrible if irresistible pun – which first aired on 11 January 1982. The aim was to give viewers lessons in computer literacy. When it went into development, a suitable machine for ...”

“... and I went to Wexford for the launch of a new history of the 1798 Rising, The Year of Liberty by Thomas Pakenham. The Rising was important for us: from our housing estate we could see Vinegar Hill where ‘our side’, the rebels, had made their last stand. From early childhood I knew certain things (I hesitate to say ‘facts’) about the Rising: how the ...”

“... Cold War. Unlike his kindred spirits in Britain and France – Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron were more formidable thinkers – Schlesinger had a particularly intimate relationship with power. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of Richard Aldous’s biography is how slight Schlesinger’s influence in Washington actually was, despite his own pride in ...”

“... resemblance – suggested, too, in the solemn tone of the Zone Three chronicler – to an idea Thomas Mann used in his fable The Transposed Heads. A fable has to match invention to idea, and all with perfect simplicity. It would be easy to conclude that Doris Lessing isn’t as good at this as Thomas Mann. The dynastic ...”