“... over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less confidence about Maxime Du Camp’s six-volume Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle ...”

“... service to establish Black units, while continuing the policy of segregation. Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the highest ranking Black man in the army, was soon promoted to brigadier general (he remained the only African American general for the rest of the war). These changes led to a rise in Black enlistment. But Black draftees were often sent to training camps ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... and the question animating Mortals is whether she has fallen in love with a better man. Dr Davis Morel is a social reformer – he wants to de-Christianise Africa – with an encyclopedic mind and a touch of the crank about him. He resembles Nelson Denoon, with the important difference that Morel is black. (Not that race counts for as much as might be ...”

“... said my source. ‘And the trouble is – they’re both right.’ Now Johnson, Fox and David Davis, another whose career seemed well washed up, are in charge of our Euro negotiations. On the eve of the referendum, Johnson claimed that Europe’s ‘plan’ for us was like Hitler’s (Gove also used the Nazi analogy). Along with ...”

“... imports of these irresistible luxuries boomed too. On the whole, as the economic historian Ralph Davis concludes, ‘the consumer paid what he was asked.’ In any case, the government would have been miffed if the revenue had been seriously damaged, for these were still primarily revenue-raising taxes to pay for foreign wars. The effect on political ...”

“... in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can be expected to pick up these distant references without their being explained? How are such links forged? The ...”

“... the invention of hieroglyphics by a god, in Plato’s story in the Phaedrus, refuses it, as John Ray recalled in these pages, ‘because it would ruin his subjects’ powers of memory and concentration’. Television stands accused of promoting apathy and inertia, pocket calculators of the decay of mental arithmetic. Often technology is blamed for an ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... counterproductive and ideologically driven’. In September, the Tory civil libertarian David Davis told Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, an unlikely place to hear a defence of unions, that ‘there are bits of [the bill] which look OTT, like requiring pickets to give their names to the police force. What is this? This isn’t Franco’s Britain.’ The next ...”

“... Digest aphorisms, fake quotations from Lenin, and conspiracy theories spun by outfits like the John Birch Society. Well into the 1980s, he remained convinced that the Kremlin leadership was intent on turning the Caribbean into a ‘Red lake’. This evidence-free formulation was used to justify the administration’s secret and illegal arming of Contra ...”

“... in Whitman, just as Whitman’s many early admirers in England had done, like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, who seemed primarily taken with his poetry because it spoke for and to gay men like themselves. He is at his frequent best, however, when his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the look-out for what they hope ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... psychedelic guru Ram Dass put it, to ‘be here now.’The same year that Suzuki arrived, Ronald Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which still stages free outdoor performances of raucously political theatre. The Sierra Club was expanding from its roots as a California-based mountaineering club with some achievements in conservation into a national ...”

“... this Hollywood dreck, Ben?’ Roth wanted to know, ‘And why are you gay men so beguiled by Bette Davis?’ Yeah, Ben, what gives? Roth: ‘You don’t look twice at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring sexiness, even in London. In the 1980s. When I had her.’ When I had her: how the phrase just rolls off the ...”