“... The South Wales union leadership was similarly disappointed in 1983, after a stay-down strike at Lewis Merthyr colliery in February gained little support. In a foreshadowing of the events of the next year, pickets met with hostility in Nottinghamshire and only South Wales overwhelmingly backed strike action when a national ballot was called, with only half ...”

“... If Britons wished to avert ‘the heavy national judgment which is hanging over us’, Thomas Clarkson said in a sermon in 1787, they would have to ‘remove the stain of the blood of Africa’. For Wilberforce, ‘establishing a trade on true commercial principles’ would be a way of making ‘reparations to Africa’. This was as far as they ...”

“... At times the sexuality of women’s bodies elicits oddly visceral effects: ‘I looked at Sir Thomas Champneys & thought of poor Rosalie; I looked at his daughter & thought her a queer animal with a white neck.’ ‘I had the comfort of finding out the other evening who all the fat girls with short noses were that disturbed me at the 1st H. Ball. They ...”

“... the abandoned child in The Death of the Heart (1938), is to be stored for a year with her brother Thomas Quayne and his wife, Anna, in their desirable residence at 2 Windsor Terrace, Regent’s Park, in the expectation either that they might grow to like her, or that she’ll somehow acquire a husband (she’s sixteen). If all else fails, Portia will ‘go ...”

“... Founded by private subscription in 1841, the London Library was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle, a serious man. For its 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him ...”

“... knows what this means). Christ Church, the college of Burton and Corbett, is also the college of Lewis Carroll. Although Burton himself characterised his work with the terms ‘Menippean’, ‘macaronic’, ‘cento’, none of these is offered as a straight description. One can almost say that the Anatomy is jokingly described as a joke, and that this was ...”

“... of a great good place to write. Friends and acquaintances pop up for a paragraph and drop out: Thomas Wolfe, Gary Cooper, millionaire sportsmen – a parade of guests at Key West who booze, fish, admire the great man and leave. To Reynolds’s Hemingway nothing really mattered except writing well. Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa are read ...”

“... more narrowly. This rather cosy story of politics and parties received a severe jolt in 1929 when Lewis Namier posed the question why men entered Parliament and answered that, at least in the middle of the 18th century, they mostly did so for reasons that had nothing to do with party or politics. This opened the psephological era of Parliamentary history ...”

“... Mayfair Estate came into the Grosvenor family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also brought with her other London lands which later became Pimlico and Belgravia. Enjoying enormous natural advantages of location, from which indifferent early management could not detract, Mayfair was developed ...”

“... much else) of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, then wholesale later on. It read like a ready amalgam of Lewis Carroll, nursery rhymes and the Goons, though Lennon himself located its centre of gravity elsewhere. ‘I went through my Dylanesque period a long time ago with songs like “I am the Walrus”,’ he remarked in last year’s Playboy interview: ‘the ...”

“... New York but Minneapolis, where the behaviourist B.F. Skinner worked, and where, since 1969, Thomas Bouchard has taught a course on the ‘measurement’ of individual personalities and twins. ‘Not every university offers such a course,’ Bouchard has remarked, ‘in part because race, gender and class differences are closely compared, which arouses ...”

“... al-Rasheed spent a chapter analysing the output of a pseudonymous Islamist activist known as Lewis Atiyat Allah. I monitor an anonymous, well-sourced Twitter account called @mujtahidd for news about MBS. Al-Rasheed’s narrative in this book sometimes verges on rumour and hearsay. At one point she describes a theory about King Faisal’s assassination in ...”

“... epigraphs, and brief quotations from other British writers, including Wordsworth, Byron and Monk Lewis. Robbins expands her analysis in In Search of Hannah Crafts, a collection of 23 essays on the book and its context which she has edited with Gates. The Dickens connection is, as she argues, substantial; Crafts used Bleak House as a source for ...”

“... exclusivist as the Nazi state which in Eliot’s eyes helped to spell its ruin. It represented, as Thomas Mann understood, a disabling sublimation of the spirit that left actual human life perilously open to the assaults of barbarism. Moreover, though racism and anti-semitism are not essential components of right-wing Tory belief, as they are of most Fascist ...”

“... tricks of voice and tone to worry about replicating the bullying quality he identifies in C.S. Lewis’s writing, and after illustrating an argument he’ll step back to concede that a particularly seductive passage might add up to little more than ‘a special effect in prose, controlled by me’. When he expounds his subjects’ thinking from the ...”