“... taking a potshot at the hated Inkatha masses come, Inkatha said, to demonstrate in favour of their king; in order to attack Shell House, say the ANC. What no one disputes is that the marchers had applied for and obtained police permission for the march; that they carried spears and sticks but few guns; that they did not fire first; and that their ...”

“... work in the world if he had to earn his own living. He gave Frederic the best available education; King’s College School in the Strand produced, during the 35 years of Major’s headship, almost a hundred boys who got into Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography; and if Oxford seemed a bit disappointing after that, Harrison could still claim that ...”

“... was guaranteed to increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter ...”

“... Defying the advice of the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit, the Oxford History of the Laws of England began in the middle, with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R ...”

“... for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white ...”

“... cows, hawking bread in the streets, scaring birds, bookkeeping for the parish overseer. Like John Clare, who escaped to the woods to read ‘Sixpenny Romances’ as a child, he loved books and hid them from stern elders who equated reading with laziness. Unlike Clare, he got money for books from stealing and used to squirrel away halfpence when he was ...”

“... the programme was as a colossal problem-solving machine. The first problem was the one John Kennedy presented to Nasa in May 1961 when he said that there would be an American on the moon before the end of the decade. Was that even possible? As​ Roger Launius, a former official historian of Nasa, explains in Reaching for the Moon, Kennedy was ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”

“... the hundred or so stanzas of Childe Harold, Canto IV in English), Bismarck, Nietzsche, and mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who may even have taken Byron’s epicene hero Sardanapalus as a model of regal behaviour. The books by Hermione de Almeida and Philip Martin are much more direct attempts to meet the challenge Byron makes to the literary critic. If he is ...”

“... of his Reflections, denounced the French Revolution as an epic tragedy in the making, a real-life King Lear in which foolish intentions would inexorably melt into blood (‘in the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows’). A swelling number of French counter-revolutionaries agreed with him, hoping in vain to forge ...”

“... the language of Jacobean economics, or of R.A. Foakes and Stephen Greenblatt on the contexts of King Lear. This is one biography which doesn’t forget that by far the most interesting residue left by Shakespeare’s life is his writings. Thus, instead of simply describing the curriculum Shakespeare studied at his Stratford grammar school, Honan offers a ...”

“... The Salsette, a P&O steamship of 6000 tons, was torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat on 20 July 1917. John Liddiard, a British diver forever in search of a new discovery, says that the Salsette is ‘the Mecca of South Coast wreck-diving. Ask any Weymouth skipper and it seems that just about every charter group wants to dive this one.’ Robert Louis ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... in his own day could be accounted Powell’s leading champion. In a front-page spread in the TLS, John Bayley hailed him under the banner of ‘A Family and Its Fictions’. There was a conflict in Powell, he explained, between the Gothic and Gallic sides of his imagination, which lent much of the richness to his work – provided the former, with its better ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”