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“... colonial past. Time was a source of conflict for the early inhabitants of the English colonies. James I, Charles I and Archbishop Laud held that the Sabbath should serve as a day for diversion as well as for worship. The Book of Sports, a set of regulations for Sundays and Holy Days issued by James in 1618, decreed ...”

“... case of a prejudice shared in varying degrees by other ‘improvised Europeans’ like Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, T.S. Eliot and Pound. His interpreters haven’t ignored or condoned his obsession, but neither have they explored its possible bearing on other aspects of his thought and personality. He seems to have looked upon Jews as ...”

“... The spirit is sometimes called Structuralism, sometimes Deconstruction or Post-Structuralism. James Gribble’s book is a call to action: the teaching of literature, he argues, should be based upon the centrality of literary criticism. Literary criticism is ‘that form of discourse which undertakes the analysis of works of literature so as to do justice ...”

“... wasn’t written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern biography, biography with ...”

“... He died, in fact, while on a final lecture tour in England, collapsing after a reading in St James Hall in March 1870. Nor is Conrad any less misleading about Dickens’s first trip to America. Having served up some ersatz fare about American Notes (‘in Dickens’s nightmarish America, there is emptiness: panic has driven away even the ...”

“... achieves manhood, even if with a coarser, colder and more withdrawn self; he becomes what Henry James called ‘finely aware and richly responsible’, as a literary hero for James preferably should be. This is beyond Henry’s ken. It may also be a sign of the tragedy’s formidable solidity, a statement about the cost ...”

“... Queen’s Rebels). While I can’t abide the Orange Order, its central totemic figure – William of Orange – is and always will be a heroic figure for me. When Hazlitt remarks that England was to reject the ‘detestable doctrine’ of the divine right of kings, which ‘first tottered and fell headless to the ground with the martyred ...”

“... flush with rage. He was an elective invisible. The artisan, the artificer. John Bayley, describing James Joyce in a review in this journal, called him ‘the penman of the family’. Praise indeed. A curse from which there is no possible abdication, a lifelong task, and one which Ian Penman has accepted with quixotic and sharp-witted stoicism. So what does ...”

“... whom a title might be hoped for in return. Leading examples of Scott’s oiling of royalty are his James V of Scotland in The Lady of the Lake (1809), Queen Caroline, consort of George II, as a healing principle of Mercy in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and Queen Elizabeth I, epitome of successful English monarchs, in Kenilworth (1821). Sutherland is ...”

“... though less widely recorded, among others. What there was, according to Favret, was the poet William Cowper, publishing The Task in 1785 in the aftermath of the American War of Independence, which must be considered a global war even if it did not involve the sheer manpower of the campaigns against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Cowper is at the ...”

“... or, as Joyce put it, ‘privysuckatary’ – to the retired diplomat and belletrist Sir William Temple. Swift may even have been an illegitimate half-brother of Temple, Damrosch suggests (one might say speculates). But it’s tempting to see him more as the hapless Dorothea to Temple’s Casaubon, sentenced on his patron’s death to ten ...”

“... envoy of George III. Nobody in Beijing knew why he was there. He assumed that his commission from William Pitt made him an ambassador, and that his mission was to negotiate new trade relations between Britain and the Qing empire. Like many in Britain he believed that the ‘Canton System’ was designed to restrict the scope of British trade at Guangzhou and ...”

“... spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting affords Seamus Heaney a remarkable opportunity, of which he takes remarkable advantage, to ruminate, not only on his very ...”

“... slavery. Emory University began a ‘process of discovery and dialogue’ about its history. William and Mary, the second-oldest college in the US, began a similar project in 2009, and in 2013 the University of Virginia appointed a Commission on Slavery and the University; it also became host to the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, which soon ...”

“... self reading ‘The Tree of Justice’ in Rewards and Fairies, the old madman brought before King William by Rahere the Jester revealed as Harold Godwin, and Hugh, the Saxon knight, kneeling to him. And ‘each time,’ writes Inglis, ‘the queer, crisp ripple of excitement tingled along my spine; the brimming tears which never quite fell, the chokey lump in ...”