“... the campus and employed a secretary to assist him as editor of the Yale Daily News. When Henry Wallace, the Kremlin-curious US presidential candidate, visited New Haven, Buckley and his friends dressed as proto-beatniks holding a sign that read ‘Give Russia the Atom Bomb’, and intended to release some doves, but failed to find ‘an opportune ...”

“... its vote like this: Winthrop Rockefeller for governor, William Fulbright for senator and George Wallace for President. It has correctly been described as one of the richest little poor states in the union. Today’s Little Rock has a skyline of modern corporatism, housing numerous local monopolies such as Tyson Foods, the Worthen Bank, the Stephens ...”

“... by American generals who had directed major operations in Iraq. Both Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus considered themselves experts in counterinsurgency – the respectable term for trying to suppress domestic resistance to a military occupation. British soldiers were supposed to fall in line with American thinking and avoid making too many ...”

“... appeared in 1972, and Harold Bloom called it the most distinguished book of American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major imaginative event’, John Hollander said, and John Ashbery – in his first piece for the New York Review of Books – hailed Ammons as an ‘American original’. ‘I was born big ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... The Western Canon, as though its author – and its editor, since the book has been assembled by David Mikics from pieces written over the past half-century – was provoked by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert ...”

“... did not long survive her son’s birth, and soon afterwards Ms Woolvine met and married David McCluskie, a plasterer and bricklayer. Terry took McCluskie’s name, though this was never regularised. The family moved to London after the strike at Cammell-Laird, when David McCluskie was finding work hard to come ...”

“... inimical to scientific inquiry’: yet John Herschel, Charles Lyell, Richard Owen, Alfred Wallace and many other men of science pursued their scientific work in the conviction that there was real theological grandeur in the immensity and intricate designs of a scientifically-perceived creation. She notes that the period of natural history’s greatest ...”

“... to be printed in Scotland into the 19th century – it seems to have been, like Blind Harry’s Wallace, something which no self-respecting Scots household was complete without. This popularity has caused modern scholars some perplexity. It is not that early readers of the poem knew something about it that we don’t, to judge from the parody of 1701 that ...”

“... the strain of his wide coverage is no doubt partly responsible for some strange omissions (with Wallace Stevens the most notable). Stapleton in his own Preface ingenuously tells us of his ‘enthusiasm and abiding love of the subject’, and adds that ‘a guide who never makes a comment makes a dull companion.’ He makes a great many, and since they ...”

“... version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second World War. This reading of Hollywood is anticipated by Leslie Fiedler’s ...”

“... make unlikely aesthetes and philosophers: the flattened affect displayed by Keir Dullea’s David Bowman in 2001 seems the more likely personality profile, or the slow psychological implosion of the cosmonauts in Solaris. But the characters in Orbital can’t leave the meaning of life alone. If Nell indicates the multidimensional field of view outside ...”

“... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...”

“... of point of view, McGurl is following the lead of such figures as Ken Kesey and his teacher Wallace Stegner, who founded the Stanford creative writing programme in 1946. It was in Stegner’s class, McGurl relates, that Kesey learned that point of view ‘truly is the most important problem in writing’:The book I have been doing [One Flew over the ...”

“... the repressiveness of the two Red Scares; the glowering populism of Father Coughlin and George Wallace; the savagery and corruption of slumlord capitalism. It seeks to dismantle what remains of the country’s already diminished democracy, and to establish in its place a predatory regime answerable to a single leader and his entourage. Whether the regime ...”