“... no women were employed in astronomy, or any other science, elsewhere. (An excellent book by George Johnson focuses on one of those women, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the under-acknowledged astronomer who deduced a way to measure distances in space.) Writing about a group of people is tricky – it is easier for a reader to connect to the story of an ...”

“... the Thames. Waldorf and Nancy hosted epic house parties there, welcoming, among others, Shaw, Amy Johnson, Roosevelt (F.D.), Henry Ford, Asquith, Charlie Chaplin, J.M. Barrie, Churchill, Henry James, Edith Wharton, kings and queens and Mahatma Gandhi. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand spent a weekend there not long before his assassination. By the 1930s, the guest ...”

“... dogs; once the hounds have ripped them apart, their market value is decreased. Hannah’s novel is frank about the sexual abuse of black women, which reinforces the South’s ‘domestic institution’ by breeding more slaves, and in addition poisons the marriages of the whites. She describes how white mistresses and black maids grow close to each other ...”

“... wrote to Gilbert Murray – in that British tradition of biting melancholy that runs at least from Johnson to Larkin – ‘the state of mankind always had been and always would be a state of just tolerable discomfort,’ there was some comfort, and some justness, in that kind of truthfulness. Even if perfectionism was covert religion, trying to get things ...”

“... him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But when you saw Andy naked, he looked like a beautiful boy.’ Another lover from the same period describes him as ‘almost repulsive ...”

“... Speaking’) on feminism, Gorbachev and deconstruction, which is in some ways engagingly frank about its aims, in some ways (I think) mistaken in achieving them. He sets out to perform ‘a great service ... to the dwindling body of linguistic reactionaries’ – namely, to provide an argument for the use of he as opposed to he or she, s/he etc. He ...”

“... Peterley Harvest has been overlooked by Mr Graves (who uses the evidence of commentators such as Frank Harris): but who can doubt that the non-existent Peterley was among the audience at the Senate House that May afternoon in 1933, and that we are reading an exact, first-hand account from this invisible man? Housman rose, placed a brown-covered small octavo ...”

“... own dignity and secure their own liberty. But as one of the leading historians of slavery, Walter Johnson, recently observed, much of the newer scholarship has been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal – a ...”

“... of one of his detractors, Ishmael Reed, stuffing himself ‘with lobster and duck at the Johnson White House’. The success of Ellison’s individualist crusade lured him into an extreme version of public life.It seems likely that Ellison’s sense of vindication had an impact on his novel in progress. But whatever its repercussions for his creative ...”

“... and ploughing, in alphabetical order, along shelves of American poetry. It took a while to reach Frank O’Hara, Olson and Wallace Stevens.Ian Brinton, retired from his role as head of English at Dulwich College, agreed to meet me for a conversation about Prynne’s childhood. He attended Bramble Wood School, the infant collective run by Muriel Prynne from ...”

“... consultants they plan to remake Afghanistan in much the way their forebears in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought to forge a new Vietnam alongside the backroom boys from the Rand Corporation. As in Vietnam, indigenous resistance to the American project is hindering its realisation. Security is an obsession, the precondition for achieving the ...”

“... justice’. He had recently stepped down as director of public prosecutions when his local MP, Frank Dobson, announced his retirement. Starmer entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden Council as well as a popular local doctor. He drank ...”

“... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...”

“... had installed itself in the KPD headquarters, now conveniently vacant. Liddell was assisted by Frank Foley, MI6’s Berlin station chief, whose diplomatic cover was passport control officer. On 31 March, the two men entered Karl Liebknecht Haus, now renamed Horst Wessel Haus and sporting a huge swastika where only weeks earlier Lenin had stared out from a ...”

“... translation. See Nations slowly wise, and meanly just, To buried Merit raise the tardy Bust, Dr Johnson remarked, but it isn’t the Danes who are raising this ‘tardy Bust’ to their own most famous son. They continue to affect the humorous indifference and condescending contempt which for more than a hundred years have been blinding them to the truth ...”