“... for these long hours she would not average more than 4s a week, and very often less than that’. James Allen, a shoemaker, took his employer to the Northampton Petty Sessions in 1879 alleging that he had not been paid £1 12s 7d for work closing uppers. In 1882 London shoemakers went on strike to protest against the practice of docking part of their wages to ...”

“... only once more in the Hebrew Bible, to describe Moses’s rush basket (translated in the King James Version as the ‘ark of bulrushes’). Origen had imagined a square pyramid floating on a raft, but Hugh understood that such a structure would capsize immediately. He gave the ark a hull, then placed a sloped roof on the top and a door and window at the ...”

“... One particularly turbulent paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is ...”

“... to be fitted lifeboats, the fizz of welding torches, the juddering of rivet guns. The shipyard of James Lamont and Co. bordered the castle on its upriver side. Downriver, and even closer, lay the Ferguson Brothers yard. The ships built at both yards were small – 300 feet long at most – and had humdrum purposes: ferries, tugs, minesweepers, dredgers, the ...”

“... The opening line of the year’s most substantial historical contribution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, is: ‘Global brands don’t come much bigger than Charles Darwin.’ Quite right.Darwin freely confessed to late-onset philistinism: ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen ...”

“... and Classification Department. It was hardly a heroic war.’ But he did write heroically. William Pritchard, in his biography of Jarrell, says that ‘in letter after letter, Jarrell turned the routine, the boredom, the loneliness and the wastefulness of army life far from the zones of combat into the figures of something like art.’ In February ...”

“... Diplomats from George Kennan to Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union) and William Burns (later head of the CIA under Biden) all warned against extending Nato eastwards. They predicted that the siting of potential adversaries – perhaps eventually nuclear-armed ones – along its border would exacerbate Russia’s fears of encirclement ...”

“... eight years he was Rowdy Yates in Rawhide and was discovered by Sergio Leone, supposedly because James Coburn didn’t want the job and everyone else was too expensive. Back in America after making three Italian films (in Spain), Eastwood founded his own company, Malpaso, in 1968, and has kept his independence, and a reputation for working quickly and for ...”

“... and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed to be a ...”

“... of public business or its reductive impact on his imagination. In the mid-18th century the poet William Mason, like Marvell a native of Hull, proudly remembered how after 1660 Marvell’s ‘daring genius’ rose to ‘loftier heights’ than ‘beauty’s praise, or plaint of slighted love’, and ‘led the war’ against ‘freedom’s foes’. By the ...”

“... office, the banks and the castle, and to issue a demand that George III dismiss the government of William Pitt and make peace with the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a ...”

“... assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s ...”

“... other casualties’, in her gloomy list. Anne Jessop Beechey, the second wife of the portraitist William Beechey, began to show miniatures a year into their marriage in 1795. ‘She proposed it as a resource in case of any accident happening to him,’ Farington reported in his diary. ‘They have Six children.’ The painter Amelia Noel, soliciting ...”

“... of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger ...”