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“... Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.They held a pistol so hard against his foreheadthere was still the mark of an O when he got home.One of the finest poems, and typically tantalising, is the title poem from Why Brownlee left, about a man who vanishes into thin air one morning, leaving his team still harnessed to the plough:Shifting their weight from foot ...”

“... barley and bean fields. The rice paddies could have survived the rain, but not the cold. Snow, frost and freezing fog enveloped the land in July and August. Villagers were reduced to eating soil. The conditions persisted for three years. Wood doesn’t give an estimate for how many people died, but ‘mortality’ was ‘high’. The emperor, two thousand ...”

“... there are wonderful remarks on Don Quixote, extraordinary essays on Byron, Dickens, Ibsen, Frost, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence; but when Auden wants to evoke ‘a parable of agape’, or ‘Holy Love’, he talks about Bertie Wooster’s relation to Jeeves. Bertie in his blithering is a comic model of humility, and his reward is Jeeves’s immaculate ...”

“... the first, where there was no people, no houses, but heavy heather; sleeping in shore dens, with frost and snow covering our beds for five days and five nights, until they made turf cottages … The land of my birth I would prefer to any, where there was no want of food, and no debt. We’re sweaty and satisfied as we get back to the van at Angus Beaton’s ...”

“... him, you say about yourself. ‘The whole corpus of Robespierre studies is a hall of mirrors,’ Mark Cumming says in his piece in this volume. Intending only to look at Robespierre, we see ourselves with our own startled eyes, starved or gross, inflated or diminished. Carlyle’s ‘thin lean Puritan and Precision’ scuttles forever through the English ...”

“... of the enshrined practices of the Athenian and Roman republics by Philip of Macedon and Mark Antony (although those of Demosthenes were calls to arms rather than constitutional critiques).There are at least six books now in print with the words ‘Assault on Truth’ in their titles: Oborne’s; Jeffrey Masson’s polemic against the slipperiness of ...”

“... is a controversial hi-tech agricultural company, ‘crossing wheat with Arctic cod to make it frost resistant [and] lemons with bullet ants to give them extra zest’, while the Man Group is an investment management business, though the James Man who founded the original company was an 18th-century barrel-maker (his firm supplied the navy with rum for ...”

“... Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley – and was ‘bought’ in 1998 by the then BBC2 controller Mark Thompson for broadcast at Christmas. Andrew Davies symbolised the great success of 1990s BBC drama: the reinvention of the classic serial, whose high points (including Davies’s Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch) were produced under the wing of Michael ...”

“... cheek was not always guaranteed to bring instant promotion: Capote was sacked for insulting Robert Frost. Nobody at the New Yorker had spotted him for a writer. A petulant miss, yes. A homosexual villain, maybe. But not a writer. Or not the sort of writer easily carved into nullity by the gentle-minded fiction editors of the time. The proper home for a talent ...”

“... popular science halves its readership. The same is true of notation in a book about music. These mark the point at which readers admit that they don’t understand the propositions being made, certainly not to the point of being able to join a technical discussion at however basic a level, but are just nodding along. If they understand, they understand by ...”

“... cold and though there was no snow the Cam was frozen and the lawns and quadrangles white with frost; coming to it from the soot and grime of the West Riding I thought I had never seen or imagined a place of such beauty. And even today the only place that has enchanted me as much as Cambridge did then is Venice. It was out of term, the university had gone ...”

“... Masefield, the elderly poet laureate, giving, for instance, the address in Westminster Abbey to mark Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary. When Masefield finally died in 1967, Day-Lewis was appointed to succeed him. Letters of congratulation even included an effusion from his bank manager (‘The whole Midland is rejoicing with you’). Others reflected that ...”

“... to begin with: shortly before assuming the presidency for the first time in 2000, he told David Frost he sought ‘more profound’ integration with Nato, and ‘would not rule out’ Russian membership. In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks – having himself levelled the remains of Grozny in what was billed as a ‘counterterrorist ...”

“... may have revealed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile to the BBC as Thatcher, denouncing the TV news as ‘pure unadulterated bias’. And so it goes on, with complaints and threats stacking up like Brexit-blocked ...”

“... only that he kept a certain kind of male company. In the 18th century it was clearly possible to mark out a man like Gray as ‘effeminate’ – an adjective sometimes used of Horace Walpole and his circle by contemporaries – without implying anything about sexual preference. Walpole’s friend William Cole called Gray ‘nice’, ‘even to a Degree of ...”