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“... of this book, anywhere. They do not appear in the biography of Arthur Machen by Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, though Peterley Harvest has some vivid pages on Machen. From this biography, published three years after Peterley Harvest, the facts of Peterley’s narrative may be verified. There was, for example, a dinner held in Machen’s honour at the ...”

“... a brilliant machine for the generation of property rights. Security of title was crucial. As Sir William Petty, that ingenious pioneer of statistics who himself acquired huge estates in Ireland, pointed out, ‘there can be no incouragement to industry, where there is no assurance of what shall be gotten by it.’ Jefferson was the Founding Father most ...”

“... population, and in which death would be, if not eliminated, at least indefinitely postponed. William Godwin pointed to the enormous agricultural capacity of the world’s yet unexploited land: mind would triumph over matter, and ‘there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment.’ It was better that there should be more people rather ...”

“... journalist, because I had only just got married, and I didn’t want to be parted from my husband, William Shawcross, who had been assigned to cover the war for the Sunday Times. In our room upstairs at the Hotel Royale, Saigon, I began looking at the New Testament, and was startled to find so few passages about the Mother of God. It seems naive of me – and ...”

“... of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me immediately who he was. He was William M. Murphy himself, the author of Prodigal ...”

“... for authority. Ginsberg often claims to have issued indirectly from Whitman’s and directly from William Carlos Williams’s overcoat: but Williams’s presence of mind in language is quite different from Ginsberg’s, and his poems are far more fully composed. Most of Ginsberg’s poems document his time and collapse into it. They haven’t survived the ...”

“... the sort of charity-show swagger that mugs you with its understated discretion. Brilliant white collars, sharp enough to chop onions. Exuberant manacles of cuff. Silk ties forcibly repressed into knuckle sized knots. Ferociously bulled black shoes to mirror the action, dizzy from stomping on rib cages, hacking at kidneys, leaving hoofprints of polish ...”

“... and the slick specs that were the signature of the poet’s transit through the noise of the white world: ‘For Edward Dorn, his brilliant luminous shade.’ The after-image flares and burns like the night the atom-bomb test in the Nevada desert overwhelmed the insolent rococo of the neon waterfalls of Las Vegas. Edward Dorn by Philip Behymer Dorn ...”

“... but to use their theories to leave the world a better place than they found it. Their leader is William MacAskill, a 28-year-old lecturer at Oxford. As graduate students MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord committed themselves to donate most of their future earnings to charity (in MacAskill’s case anything above £20,000, in Ord’s £18,000), and set ...”

“... had no source but Beer it had to be discarded. Out went an early love interest, Helen Trent, whose white arms were ‘the most beautiful … I ever saw’. Out went Crane’s dismissal of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata – ‘an old maid’s picnic’ so boring, Crane said (maybe), that he couldn’t finish it. Out went several significant details in a story ...”

“... that eventually led to current, commonly held tenets about the attentions fitting to a corpse. William Price, d.1893, was an arch druid in Wales, a surgeon, a Chartist, a vegetarian, a philoprogenetive advocate of free love, who called his child, born in his late years, Jesu Grist (sic). When the baby died, he tried to burn him on a pyre, according to ...”

“... apotheosis which is awaiting it upon the cinema screen. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and William Peter Blatty’s Legion (‘The sequel to The Exorcist’) very neatly illustrate this parting of the ways. If Susan Hill’s ‘ghost story’ is not a pastiche, it is undoubtedly an essay in recreating the almost exhausted genre. We are back in that ...”

“... I’m shattered by the impact of re-entry.) A news flash. In the latest by-election The Liberal William Pitt has won the seat. His personal appeal defies detection. At previous attempts he met defeat. Clearly it is the SDP connection Which has supplied the upsurge of white heat That melts the Tory vote to a minority And ...”

“... of the Slave Trade' by Isaac Cruikshank (1792) Cruikshank based his drawing on a story told by William Wilberforce in a speech delivered in the House of Commons a week earlier, in April 1792, at the apogee of the campaign to ban the British slave trade. But while many in the country had spoken in favour of abolition – the Commons had received 519 ...”

“... with what Rory McEntegart has told us about the Articles’ gestation. What transmogrified a White Paper intended to accommodate the Lutherans into something like the opposite was that in August 1539 Cranmer was tied up in negotiations with the Germans at Lambeth while Henry was in thrall to Bishop Cuthbert Tunstal. Bernard calls the destruction of ...”