“... his wife, Betsey, bore 17 children, among whom James became a top surgeon at Bart’s, and (Sir) George professor of medicine at Cambridge. Peterson investigates Paget daughters, sisters, wives and aunts, as they moved and married within the ‘urban gentry’ of doctors, lawyers, ecclesiastics and academics. Were Paget ...”

“... Virginia, took place before a crowd of fifteen thousand in 1811 and was immortalised in a print by George Cruikshank. This did not deter the National Sporting Club more than a hundred years later, in 1929, from instituting the first formal colour bar in Britain, stipulating that future contestants for the Lonsdale Belt ‘must be legally British subjects born ...”

“... ago, of course, but even the shipping line it belonged to has vanished. The coal pit is a field. Urban grasslands and carparks have buried the foundations of the mills. The house he grew up in has been demolished and replaced by a traffic island. The school which taught him the careful handwriting has made way for a supermarket. Such is the life of the ...”

“... subject at the centre of the global economy. The truth is that shipping is responsible, as Rose George put it in the subtitle of her classic 2013 book on the subject, for ‘90 Per Cent of Everything’. It is the physical equivalent of the internet, the other industry which makes globalisation possible. The internet abolishes national boundaries for ...”

“... stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh herdsmen who ...”

“... millions of women everywhere – readers of Jane Austen and the Brontës as well as of Hardy and George Eliot, viewers of classic American Westerns along with readers of Little Women. Her own 19th-century sense of things seems to have had no trace of modern cynicism or distancing irony to dull its edge, or any corrupting doubt to cloud her vision. In her ...”

“... The watercress girl documented by Mayhew becomes a dream figure, a figment of the romance of the urban poor. In Past Tenses Steedman reflects ruefully that she seems incapable of saying anything ‘without messing with some other story, some other person’s narrative’. Conventionally one would think of the watercress girl as a starting-point for the ...”

“... was available, courtesy of Moscow, to every nascent terrorist band, nationalist or revolutionary, urban or rural, European or Latin American. They had but to ask. The Russians gave weapons, diplomatic cover, money and know-how to the Palestinians, who in turn passed it on to everyone else. They were helped by Castro, who laid on training camps and instructors ...”

“... New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close contact with his ‘Inner Glasgow’, a place of abolished pit bings and empty quays full of ‘hard nostalgia’. And ...”

“... life took the shape of playwright. ‘I want to be an artist or nothing,’ he wrote in 1914 to George Pierce Baker, applying to Baker’s famous Harvard playwriting course (tuition was paid for by the Bank of Dad). James O’Neill (c. 1880). The grandiosity of O’Neill’s plan nonetheless broadcast his Oedipal rebellion. ‘My soul is a ...”

“... Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a diverse lot, although most of them incorporated key elements of the ...”

“... In 1953, he’d founded the Paris Review in part as a front for that work, a detail he kept from George Plimpton for years. His third novel, Raditzer (1961), depicts yet another young man of means resisting paternal influence: Charles Stark foregoes joining his father’s law firm to enlist in the navy just as the war is ending. Shipping out to the ...”

“... over the war’s duration and differences across the UK were predominantly a result of rural-urban divides.Townshend refers to the work of Thomas Macknight, a journalist often credited with pioneering the ‘two nations theory’ – in which Ulster Protestants form their own distinct nation on the island of Ireland. He doesn’t mention ...”

“... of the last fifteen years isn’t one of the six who have been prime minister over that time. George Osborne would no doubt have loved to be PM, but he probably knew it wasn’t a job for him. Too smirky, too shifty, too obviously at home in City boardrooms – the British public could tell a mile off that Osborne was a bit of a banker. That made him, in ...”

“... historical reality in the name of Jacobino-Leninist piety. He struck the pose of liberal St George taking on the dragons of Marxist and Communist ideological conformity and seemed never to let his guard down, even for a moment of celebration. The tone of Revolutionary France is surprisingly serene, in contrast, as if the author knew that the major ...”