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“... work, historians soon learned to remind themselves, was equally so of all the great books in that broad movement of political thought, from the Renaissance to the 18th century, in which Locke stands. In England the writings of the mid-Tudor resistance theorists, of Hobbes and the Civil War republicans, of Burke and Paine, were written in the hope of ...”

“... William Godwin is a man who cries out to be the subject of a life. He has everything: a repressed personality, ripe for psychoanalysis; a role in the high dramas of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, his son-in-law Shelley and the infant grandchildren; a circle of interesting friends, many of them articulate enough to leave written records, and famous enough to have their letters preserved ...”

“... the church’s ‘maladjusted economy’. They were the inventors of the analysis, beloved of William Tyndale and many early Protestants, that ‘Popery’ had grown up because it was for the profit of the clergy. It was this belief which enabled early Protestants, up to and including Jewel, to believe the mists of Popery would disperse before the clear ...”

“... indeed with a gratifying coarseness. The last quality, accompanied by a tendency to make rather broad (and sometimes rather good) jokes, distances Barrell’s prose from that of his subject, for whom he occasionally evinces a touch of humorous contempt. Indeed one general complaint about the book might be that Barrell hardly bothers to persuade the reader ...”

“... The story goes that, on the day when William Empson moved into Magdalene College, Cambridge, to take up a fellowship, his suitcases (as was the custom in those days) were unpacked by one of the college servants. The gyp was so shocked by the contents of Empson’s bags that he decided to report him to the college authorities ...”

“... William Lilly was the first to produce a major textbook of astrology in the English language, at a time when the truth of astrology was almost universally recognised. At their peak in the 1650s his almanacs sold up to 30,000 copies a year. From them he may only have netted a modest £70 a year (enough for a gentleman to live on), but they served to advertise his astrological practice, from which we have the surviving records of many thousands of consultations ...”

“... Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled William III and the Dutch fleet to stage a successful invasion in 1688 and disrupt the country yet again. Domestic strife and European enemies also restricted the navy’s enterprise in non-European waters before 1750, and so too did its own flaws. An expensive ...”

“... form of religious dogma (although I do remember with some affection what it was like to do so).’ William Cowper wrote: ‘Blind unbelief is sure to err.’ But so is blind belief. Standing where he does, MacCulloch is aware of the importance of understanding his subject for those who are not religious: ‘The decay of actual religious practice in Europe ...”

“... had been allied to the Orange family since the marriage of Charles’s daughter Mary to the second William of Orange in 1641. William’s death in November 1650, which made possible two decades of republican rule in the Netherlands, was as large an event in Dutch politics as the execution of his father-in-law the previous ...”

“... re-interpretation of the Cold War. But the new view of Eisenhower has been no less a part of the broad assault on mainstream liberalism than the new view of the Cold War, and no less infuriating to liberals. Eisenhower was widely scorned in the first decade after his retirement as a genial nonentity whose Administration slumbered through the ...”

“... verbal instructions) than with the issue of class. Josephson is right in saying that there was a broad moral and social agenda behind the ‘good taste’ of the transcriptions espoused by the Folk-Song Society (whose founding members included Victorian stalwarts like Sir Hubert Parry and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford) and the idea that folk-song was a ...”

“... a pen sticking out of his breast pocket, wearing on his head, of all things, a trilby hat with a broad black band; lined up behind him are three messengers waiting to take his copy to the post office. The man is identified as the Reuters correspondent, J.W. Collins. The text tells us, though, that the Reuters correspondent in Abyssinia in 1935 was Major Jim ...”

“... American fiction’. ‘Paranoid school’ doesn’t get you very far – Pynchon and Mailer, both broad-brush comparisons, were the other faculty members Towers had in mind – but there’s mileage in the notion of DeLillo as a shaman. ‘Fiction, at least as I write it and think of it,’ he told a reading group in 1995, ‘is a kind of religious meditation ...”

“... critics associated with the library of Alexandria in around the second century BC to describe a broad range of poems written to be sung either by solo voices or a chorus. Lyres were not compulsory, but music seems to have been, and so several kinds of poem which we would now include within our much broader conception of ‘lyric’, such as elegies and ...”

“... fully described here, was entrusted to an Englishman familiar with Wren’s plans, the engineer William Lindley, who spoke German, and was at the time managing the construction of one of Germany’s earliest railway lines, close by the damaged city. Bomb damage to Hamburg as of 1 October 1944: the heavy shading means more than 70 per cent damaged, the ...”