“... told Cushla he’d love to bath her’.Other details are more pointed. Michael takes Cushla to see John Lavery’s Easter Rising painting, The Trial of Sir Roger Casement, which he admires for being ‘so quietly subversive’; we don’t need to hear Cushla say so to know that, in her world, quiet subversion is a category error. Visiting the McGeown family on ...”

“... In the polarised atmosphere of George III’s reign, a host of political clubs took root. John Wilkes’s success in mobilising antigovernment sentiment during the 1760s owed much to a battery of radical associations, including the Anti-Gallican, Beefsteak and Albion clubs, and the masonic lodges. From the 1790s the Society for Constitutional ...”

“... gives a voice to a group who are not generally believed to have (or to be entitled to) one, while John Conroy’s account is that of a sympathetic outsider nervously learning the codes and concerns of a small Catholic community at the eye of the storm. At the academic level, the heightened interest in Irish history in England has found a focus in the dynamic ...”

“... these doubts come to mind partly because of changes in Irish poetry that Heaney himself helped foster by encouraging younger writers. In 1966, when his first book appeared, other values were in play, and his reception was astonishingly positive. Poems like ‘Trout’ (‘Hangs, a fat gun-barrel,/deep under arched bridges’) and ‘The Early ...”

“... been brought up by her grandparents, both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the great producers of the day who used ...”

“... meanwhile has had to come to terms with its historical shame, even though the Prime Minister, John Howard, derides this as ‘black armband’ history and wishes it away. How racism reproduces itself in contemporary Australia is the subject of Race Matters. The contributors give sardonic accounts of such topics as the attempt to re-assign Aboriginal names ...”

“... a fictional symposium that ran in the paper between 1822 and 1835. The author of the Noctes was John Wilson, who constructed dialogues between his own alter ego (‘Christopher North’) and that of Hogg (‘the Shepherd’). The Shepherd gets the best lines – better, some have suggested, than anything Hogg ever wrote – but he is also made to look a ...”

“... words of Nick Cohen. The best introduction to the history of British Trotskyism is a pamphlet by John Sullivan, a former member of the International Socialists, called Go Fourth and Multiply/When this Pub Closes – that’s ‘fourth’ as in Fourth International.2 Sullivan, who died in 2003, wrote these notes in the 1980s as an affectionate but critical ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please ...”

“... water or filled the place with holiday bungalows. There had been no consumerism or television to foster aberrant desires, no immigration to pollute the village’s ancestral stock, no metrication to confound the valley’s innate sense of measure, no welfare state to homogenise its community and weaken the character of its villagers. No liberal progressives ...”

“... any definition.’ Newton is enlisted into the gay fraternity, partly on the fictional evidence of John Barth’s Sot Weed Factor; Gray is ‘clearly homosexual’; Akenside is ‘exclusively homosexual’; and Handel is declared ‘more homosocial than the norm for the age’. As Rousseau extends his list to include Burke, Smollett, Cleland and Horace ...”

“... real Pig Islander’. A story she told me more than once was of how my great-great-grandfather John Flatt, a lay catechist, had fallen out with the Church Missionary Society by suggesting that its missionaries in New Zealand were acquiring too much Maori land. Twenty years ago, in the British Museum, I looked up evidence Flatt gave, while in London in ...”

“... course of the week. The majority’s loyalties remained with the Home Rule party and its leader, John Redmond. Ever since Parnell had been hailed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’ in the 1880s, the majority of nationalists had supported the parliamentary campaign for Home Rule, hoping that Westminster could be persuaded or cajoled into devolving ...”

“... seas; the Clashing Rocks crush rash explorers. Natural conservatism and the passion for authority foster an acceptance of tradition, however grotesque. Ultimately non-tenable theories, above all that of the geocentric universe, attract too great a weight of psychological and religious investment to be abandoned with impunity. But, as Galileo may or may not ...”