“... in effect, slaves. ‘The railway,’ Hochschild writes, ‘was a modest engineering success and a major human disaster. Men succumbed to accidents, dysentery, smallpox, beriberi and malaria, all exacerbated by bad food and relentless floggings by the two-hundred-man railway militia force … Some estimates … place the non-white [deaths] close to 1800 a year ...”

“... of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The other writer, however, dealt with French current affairs and the social position of education in a different manner: GUISE: My Lord of Anjou, there are a hundred Protestants Which we have chased into the river Seine That swim ...”

“... Schuyler had an inkling. Having been introduced to the audience at the Dia Art Foundation by John Ashbery, he read from his newly published Selected Poems, on the back cover of which Ashbery’s blurb declared: ‘Schuyler is simply the best we have.’He began the reading that night with the first poem he ever published, ‘Salute’, written in 1951 ...”

“... Brief History of Seven Killings, winner of the Booker Prize in 2015, but here it is the whole. The major characters are all gay men, with ages ranging from around twenty (in the case of Jordan and the narrator of the opening section, Eddy Porteous) to their fifties. The senior figure is Havelock Titus, who has the idea of rehearsing a play in his home (the ...”

“... ignorant, the most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom,’ John Adams, the second American president, wrote in 1815. The notion that they could form a ‘confederation of free governments’, as the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda had proposed, was as ‘absurd as similar plans would be to establish ...”

“... for ‘When will my people be free?’‘For Scots with mixed [English and Scottish] parentage,’ John Lloyd wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, ‘a forced choice is uncomfortable. Should we, on the model of American blacks, claim “blackness” – or in this case Scottishness – as our dominant identity?’ Lloyd was not alone in feeling that his ...”

“... is among the wonders of English poetry, comparable only to that of his greatest poetic hero, John Keats, who inevitably features in the list of luminaries with whom Owen compares Sassoon in a particularly excessive epistolary tribute:Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as Keats ...”

“... soon not know about. Ministers went on making soothing statements. The Agriculture Secretary, then John Gummer, notoriously fed his daughter a beefburger on television. It became clear, too, that in some way officialdom was leaning on the vets and scientists in officialdom’s pay, telling them to damp down their cries of alarm. ‘They didn’t seem to want ...”

“... the Holy Grail for the Knights Not Round the Table – Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Sir Bill Cash, Sir John Redwood et al – and they have devoted their adult lives to it. But they have more in mind than this. They hope also to undo the constitutional and administrative reforms of the Blair years. What they want to achieve is a simplification of democracy. The ...”

“... had been the chairman of Eurotunnel, was appointed to run the Strategic Rail Authority, created by John Prescott in 1999 to give direction to the privatised industry. Morton commissioned a report from Atkins and Ernst & Young to assess whether there was a need for such a line. By the time they reported in 2003, Morton – who was too outspoken to occupy such a ...”

“... before leaving the town: ‘This is to give notice to all the World that Andrew Tucker and his son John Tucker are Clowns, and Cowards.’ It is his earliest extant manuscript, and is reproduced here along with the portrait of Sarah Andrew. Such episodes, taken from local archives and legal records, are among the best things in the book, though part of the ...”

“... in 1947, at the age of 74, made sure that all of her private papers were burned. About the two major emotional relationships of her life – the first with Isabelle McClung, a Pittsburgh heiress and the beloved ‘best companion’ to whom she dedicated The Song of the Lark; the second with Edith Lewis, a fellow spinster from Nebraska with whom she lived ...”

“... exhibition in 1876, where he exhibited The Floor Scrapers. The next year, he sh0wed several other major paintings, including those usually seen as his masterpieces, The Pont de l’Europe and Paris Street; Rainy Day. He contributed to the subsequent Impressionist exhibitions of 1879, 1880 and 1882. And he was not significant only for his work – or for his ...”

“... as an interpolation since ancient times, and by modern scholars almost unanimously: it has major inconsistencies with the rest of the Iliad, its style is different, and it can be excised without leaving a trace.’ Each contention has some merit, yet the exclusion of Book 10 still amounts to an extreme case of chutzbris – chutzpah for ...”

“... or criminal responsibility when they thought it appropriate. The 1988 law was the culmination of a major effort to tame juries, henceforth allowing them only to ‘decide’ the obvious. It was a memory of the previous practice that encouraged the jury to try to add its note to the judgment in the case of Colin Middleton. To defend the status quo as the Home ...”