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“... plays, Richard II and Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. For all that, Shakespeare does not give Henry much more than a pasteboard personality, clearly seeing more attractive dramatic possibilities in the characters of Richard, Hotspur and Prince Hal. Historians, however, cannot dodge the question of the character of the central ...”

“... that it absorb a near-infinity of characters, events and incidental detail. Less ambitious, but more subversive, Christopher Stevenson and Hugh Nissenson seek to dismantle the system from within by producing novels which look like something else altogether: a form of experimentation which often has rather puritanical motives behind it – the assumption ...”

“... a full-scale biography of Matthew Arnold’. Since then the ambition has narrowed into something more purposive. His interest, Hamilton came to realise, was principally in the small nucleus of lyric poems and ‘a number of intriguing puzzles’ arising out of them; notably, ‘the matter of Arnold’s attitude to his own gifts as a poet: why did he abandon ...”

“... address adult son Mike’s critique re the paucity of Indigenous accounts.’Now comes something more interesting: the Pulse. The Pulse is described by our narrator, a Speaker called Jeremy, as he enters into the performance, melts into his characters and begins really speaking their lines. ‘Once the Pulse is fully upon you, here will come your words, not ...”

“... Modern American writers have taken to heart Thomas Wolfe’s warning that ‘you can’t go home again.’ These days, being American or being modern or both seems to demand recognition of exile. The writer has to say goodbye to his folks at the earliest opportunity. That is only the first stage in his education in the estrangements of our times ...”

“... else’s speeches, they are dead and should not be resurrected. Moreover, if there is one thing more tedious than reading old political speeches, it is reading long accounts of how those speeches were composed and discussed. Mr Urban treats these speech-writing sessions as though he were disclosing how Milton composed Paradise Lost or Lincoln found the ...”

“... with a rejection slip. Day Lewis, it was predicted at the time of his appointment, would be much more on the ball. After all, had he not been limbering up for this honour for some years, with his clubs and his committees and his suave, actorly ‘recitals’ of gems from our poetic heritage? At my school in the Fifties, a regular item on the assembly ...”

“... twist, or are taken down to an altogether deeper level of thought. In Volume I, McCloskey and R.P. Thomas measure the cost to the American colonists of trade control by the British Navigation Acts, and end up with the figure of under 1.8 per cent of colonial income: a new low. As a price to pay for the services of British military forces, participation in ...”

“... carrying the coffin. Two older men I had seen with him were there too: the Shankill Road bomber, Thomas Begley, having been identified from dental records, the trio we had nearly filmed at the church were accompanying his modest mortal remains on their final journey. I had been waiting for them for hours, although of course I hadn’t realised I was going to ...”

“... another dancer took her place. When the curtain came down on Act Three a messenger arrived to tell Thomas Nijinsky that he had a daughter. He already had two sons: Stanislav, aged four, and Vaslav, later le dieu de la danse, who was two. Bronislava Nijinska grew up to be one of the few choreographers of any period whose works are still performed all over the ...”

“... have stretched beyond any known horizon, becoming one of the publishing world’s core subjects. More than six hundred books have been produced about the late movie star; that’s more books than you’ll find on Florence Nightingale, Princess Diana, Boadicea and Julia Roberts put together. So what kind of story is a story ...”

“... was often put in mind of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ while reading Mark Ford’s study of Thomas Hardy. Ford doesn’t mention it (though he does refer to Baudelaire’s flaneurial poems), perhaps because that manifesto is too obvious, or too obviously theoretical: he prefers to build his case patiently, historically, in solid empirical ...”

“... among them students, who for obvious reasons prefer criticism to literature – who find theory more useful and also (which older people may find hard to believe) easier than the texts; the latter, rather than justifying the theory, are justified (if at all) by their tenuous and contingent relation to it. Allowing that E.K. Chambers’s original Oxford Book ...”

“... Yet contemporaries were convinced that the problem of atheism was both pervasive and growing. As Thomas Nashe put it, ‘there is no Sect now in England so scattered as Atheisme.’ The Spanish ambassador, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, reported in 1617 that some 900,000 people (more than a quarter of ...”

“... empire was never forced to parry with any strategy of indirect rule – in this respect the colony more resembled New Zealand than India. There was no longer a clearly defined local elite to be cultivated by the British, so one had to be created. In the 19th century, Western capital didn’t reach much further than the coasts, but the missionaries had got ...”