“... Mrs and Miss should be a minor typographical variant of the shorthand for ‘manuscript’. Casey Miller and Kate Swift, in Words and Women (1976), say Ms has been around since the 1940s, but remained largely unused and didn’t get into a dictionary until 1972. One factor in its resurgence was ‘the growth of direct mail selling’, for which the ...”

“... teachers of English – about 10 per cent of the total. They include the founder of the LRB, Karl Miller. What is clear from both Hilliard’s and Ellis’s books is Leavis’s influence in English departments outside the UK. Hilliard gives the former students’ names and destinations (Canada, South Africa, Australia – only one to the United States) and ...”

“... details and language, ‘letters’ becoming ‘mail’ and (a battle I had in The Madness of King George) the occasional ‘OK’ and ‘fine’. The film owes something to ours, beginning slightly as I intended to begin, with the court seen from the cramped perspective of the royal servants. Not looking at the monarch is made something of a feature, though ...”

“... and palefaces. Redskins are bearded bards and pagan guzzlers of experience (Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, the Beats, and that honorary American, D.H. Lawrence); palefaces, the tightly-buttoned patrician ministers of culture, society and manners (William Dean Howells, Henry James, T. S. Eliot). Although Moody tries to ride the wild surf of incantation, he’s ...”

“... batteries, ammunition stores and protective walls. Even before the colonies declared independence, George Washington ensured that the Continental Army had a chief engineer; the founding of the US Army Corps of Engineers followed that of the United States itself by just three years.In 1802, Congress authorised the founding of the US Military Academy at West ...”

“... been at the time (37) and prettier than she probably ever was (more on this later), is copied from George Richmond’s chalk drawing of 1850. Gaskell – the least distinctive of the three – is represented as much by her dress and slightly haughty stance as by her profile. She seems to be looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have ...”

“... he recommended Angus Wilson’s first book to Cecil Beaton. That same year, however, when Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, he thought the news ‘quite tiresome’. Later in 1949, he described the arrival of Auden on Ischia as having ‘thrown something of a gloom’ over the island (‘Such a tiresome old Aunty’). Before the month ...”

“... The Merchant of Venice in 1970, he says, Olivier turned up with a hook nose and goatee modelled on George Arliss’s Disraeli and had to be persuaded by his director, Jonathan Miller, to evolve in the succeeding weeks a characterisation based on his own face. No one seems to have told Holden that dress rehearsals normally ...”

“... Reveille with Beverly is a now largely forgotten 1943 film starring Ann Miller and the great Franklin Pangborn. Worked up from an equally forgotten US radio series it’s a corny but percipient tale about a spunky young DJ who’s hep to the vital Swing rhythm the kids all dig, and the stuffy station owner who wants no part of her indecorous jive ...”

“... monster, in which the … sickness and inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.’ George Kennan, the least sentimental of American diplomats, echoed Fanon, describing America as ‘a prehistoric monster’ with a ‘brain the size of a pin’. Yet even Fanon, who saw it as a ‘country of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on ...”

“... it reminds him of his German mother, who started off as Julianna Müller before becoming Julianne Miller. He has a Yoruba middle name, Olatubosun, which he has never used, since it feels ‘like something that belonged to someone else but had long been held in my keeping’. Living in a city of churning diversity certainly lowers the prestige of ...”

“... genteel, but by the time that was clear the Great War had started, so nobody blamed Uncle George. ‘Today there are no Hemingways left in Oak Park, but there are plenty of squirrels.’ So, in summary, runs the ominously leisurely opening paragraph, and it is followed by much more significant detail about crime-free Oak Park, the nobs’ refuge from ...”

“... reality than the author could bear. ‘It has become a critical commonplace,’ Linda Patterson Miller writes in her foreword to the present volume, ‘that his wounding as an American Red Cross ambulance driver in World War One scarred him psychologically and led him to create emotionally damaged heroes attempting to live in a troubled world through the ...”

“... low haunts? Unfortunately, the most frequently attributed notebooks in the new atlas are those of George Duckworth. Duckworth is now chiefly remembered as the half-brother who regularly molested Virginia Woolf and was pilloried in her memoirs as a ‘man of pure convention’. From 1892 to 1902 he was Charles Booth’s unpaid private secretary and in his ...”

“... in our lifetime has showed physical strength. This is like going back to Teddy Roosevelt or George Washington,’ the clerk said. (After being shot while campaigning in Milwaukee, Roosevelt kept speaking for fifty minutes while blood soaked his shirt.) Musk had just sent out an email asking federal workers to detail what they had accomplished at work ...”