“... from procuring slaves for New Spain to Arctic whaling. (In a similar way, the Darien Company and John Law’s Mississippi Company had seduced the Scottish and French states into backing failed colonies.) The ‘Bubble Act’ of 1720 neither prevented the bursting of the South Sea Company’s bubble when its overvalued shares collapsed in price nor stopped ...”

“... especially to mark speakers from the lower classes. Complementary points are implied by the late John Thomas Low, writing on the wealth (or at least number) of modern historical plays in Scots – if you want to have Scots-speaking characters who are not peasants, you must go back in time – and by W.F.H. Nicolaisen, who shows how often novelists use ...”

“... decadence, and can’t be understood through the writings of Fabian intellectuals or the plays of John Galsworthy.Heffer isn’t interested in new scholarship on the period unless it’s biographical. Hardly a page of this book is informed by developments in historical thinking since the 1970s; he makes his case using whatever materials come to hand most ...”

“... who had died five years earlier. Submissions in 1955 were so dismal that he privately asked John Ashbery and O’Hara for manuscripts (Ashbery’s Some Trees was the winner).Rich and her fans have bristled at some of the condescending praise her early books received. Auden’s introduction to A Change of World (1951) characterised her poems as ‘neatly ...”

“... out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a way of spending time in company with people who shared ...”

“... gives a voice to a group who are not generally believed to have (or to be entitled to) one, while John Conroy’s account is that of a sympathetic outsider nervously learning the codes and concerns of a small Catholic community at the eye of the storm. At the academic level, the heightened interest in Irish history in England has found a focus in the dynamic ...”

“... is he/she overrated? – they would quickly decline into paranoia. When Robert Frost died, John Berryman’s first response was It’s scary. Who’s Number One? Who’s Number One? Cal’s Number One, isn’t he? – which at least has the virtue of transparency. But as we modestly (and necessarily) insist that we’re just writers at work on our ...”

“... and means that if you scratched his back, he was under no obligation to scratch yours: Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Ian Hamilton Finlay are three Scottish poets whose work he dismisses where he might have been expected, if only for tactical reasons, to approve it. It is the same with Scottish literature of the past. MacDiarmid is almost alone among ...”

“... is the work of a real thinker,’ and the social links between the two men (Augustus De Morgan, for example) seem to be thought of as mitigations, but they can only be the opposite. Babbage did not even try to meet Boole before 1862. A close involvement with the hardware of his machines was far from uncongenial to Babbage: a well-to-do ...”

“... of those scholars – Ian Hacking, Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Theodore Porter, Stephen Stigler, Mary Morgan and others – who have, since the 1980s, richly documented the development of probability and statistics. What is original about Desrosières is that he narrates the story from the point of view of a statistician-cum-metaphysician.Although his history has ...”

“... on in their cabin, and the electric heater – so that it ‘would be warm on our return’. John Thayer, a young neighbour of the Eustis’s in Pennsylvania, shared a suite of rooms with his parents. After the impact, which he noticed hardly at all (‘if I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled’), he told them ...”

“... scarcely does justice to the intensity of his revulsion. Figuratively speaking, Banker Pierpont Morgan was also a ‘Jew’, but one socially within the pale. The international Jewish Bankerhood were not; nor were the clever ‘spiteful’ Jews Adams occasionally consulted or patronised. Only grudgingly did he concede to the persevering Bernard Berenson a ...”

“... to offer some sort of gratification, even if only by saying something riveting and awful about Morgan Forster. His diaries are good because they are true to his own narcissism, revealing how, in the magic spectacle of London literary life, he is always able to pull his own self out of the hat. ‘Nikos was eager to show me something he had received from ...”

“... true church’, but not ‘the unspotted lambs of the Lord’ as the Elizabethan chronicler John Stow claimed (this was another slur: Stow had Catholic sympathies).Puritanism has long commanded historical attention. Collinson helped put the politics back in, working with the grain of the ‘new’ social and cultural histories of the 1980s. What emerged ...”

“... but the most interestingly historical of them, Y Gododdín, does so only tangentially. Whatever John Morris and Leslie Alcock may have written in the 1970s and 1980s, the evidence provides ‘no space … for an “Age of Arthur” during which a victorious British emperor-like figure held back the barbarian hordes’. That image really dates back to the ...”