“... out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the ...”

“... ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule ...”

“... some mail through the bedroom window, among it a Jiffy bag with a book in it from a Dublin friend, John, the nephew I recall of the Unionist doctor who found that bronze pin all those years ago. In the book, Trees of Ireland: Native and Naturalised, I read under Hazel: ‘Fruit, a true nut, egg-shaped, up to 2cm long, pale green becoming brown with woody ...”

“... ethical code controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy ...”

“... of popular music, spinning the Beatles in a new direction. Meeting Shankar changed things for John Coltrane, too, helping him shake his dependence on drugs, while opening his ears to Eastern scales. Before Philip Glass worked with Shankar on a film score in 1965, he had been churning out unremarkable pastiches of French neoclassicism fused with folksy ...”

“... without exception he is spoken of with affection, or anyway approval. The chief exception is Sir John Hawkins, the author of the first proper biography of Johnson (published in 1787, four years before Boswell’s), and also the man for whom Johnson invented the word ‘unclubbable’ (a nice way of saying he was a crusty old snob who seldom had a good word ...”

“... classed his enormous erudite books among the many that he refused on principle to read. John Evelyn, visiting Rome in 1644, was impressed when ‘with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.’ He predicted that in a forthcoming book on obelisks ...”

“... Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe tells the story of Ukraine from Ovid (for whom the Greek colonies north of the Black Sea were ‘a handful of names in a region scarcely known’) to the present, a history which echoes through and defines today’s conflicts. Key events include the conversion in 980 of Volodymyr the Great to Greek Orthodox Christianity (the ...”

“... simplified language instruction manuals for the US Navy. He also conducted seminars with leading North American educators, and was hired by the Rockefeller Foundation to draw up a statement on the practice of reading. Some of his late works of the 1960s are described by the editor of this superb selection of his writings, a man not averse to rapping his ...”

“... boundaries and often leaping over ethnic and cultural divides. Augustine was a Roman citizen of North Africa (a fellow Maghrebian, Derrida would remind his readers), who was born in the Sahara in an oasis town, before moving to the coast and crossing the Mediterranean, a less patrolled thoroughfare then than today’s bitter cemetery. It is assumed the ...”

“... Mount kicks off with some remarks about the so-called satire boom of the early 1960s. It recalls John Bird’s The Last Laugh, the Cambridge Footlights revue of 1959 (which I saw) and while recognising that it was too radical to be very funny, claims ‘it was undoubtedly a strong influence on Peter Cook (one of the original cast members)’, implying, I ...”

“... royal party comes into Prospero’s orbit in The Tempest on its way home from a wedding in Moorish North Africa. These are the kinds of detail Lorna Hutson identified in Circumstantial Shakespeare (2015) as the crucial topics of time, place and motive from which Shakespeare builds his human dramaturgy. And here they are absent. While we don’t hear about the ...”

“... the projects was a university in Brighton, soon to become the University of Sussex. Its principal, John Fulton, worked to enlist Briggs, who was about to take ship for an assignment in Australia. Fulton offered him the post of his deputy. Briggs hesitated until he, Susan and their two small children were onboard. Then, as the Tannoy warned of departure within ...”

“... an anchor of certainty and principle that it would be physically painful to haul it in. Listen to John Berger, tending the authentic mulch of pig earth and keeping his ear close to his own well-manured ground, as he instructed the readers of the Guardian on 25 February: The Rushdie affair has already cost several human lives and threatens to cost many, many ...”

“... scattered collections – made by Marion Scott, the Gurney family, Ivor’s Gloucester friend John Haines, Vaughan Williams and others – into a central archive. The process continued after Finzi’s death in 1956. Neither Gurney nor Scott had bothered much about dates and the habit of confusion grew by amalgamation. Blunden, returning manuscripts ...”