“... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...”

“... but Gelpi is confident that his reassessment of his work, ‘will confirm his place as one of the major British poets of this century’. From the outset, readers of the book are left in little doubt that they are privileged to be witnessing a redemption, a reversal of Day Lewis’s unfortunate fall, with Gelpi casting himself in the role of saviour. Living ...”

“... once they posed a serious threat to the authority of the state. Union density declined in all the major industrial countries at the same time as it did in Britain. The successes Thatcher was able to achieve, in her own terms, in domestic policy were as much a symptom of how the country had changed as a consequence of her desire to change it. After ...”

“... Rule Act; a year later, it elected a black mayor, Walter E. Washington, thereby joining a group of major cities led by black politicians. A number of these cities – Cleveland, Detroit, Newark – would be ravaged by deindustrialisation, but at the time they were laboratories for black political power. Washington’s victory was particularly sweet. It ...”

“... British Isles, Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way. I have always looked to the poet John Hewitt’s manifesto in order to salvage a coherent identity. He wrote: I’m an Ulsterman of planter stock. I was born in the island of Ireland, so secondarily I’m an Irishman. I was born in the British archipelago and English is my native tongue, so I am ...”

“... future. You would be wrong.The International Energy Agency (IEA), which keeps tabs on all the major players in the industry, released a report in January which shows that renewable energy and carbon capture technologies currently represent just under 1 per cent of the industry’s investments. BP does slightly better than some of its competitors, with ...”

“... my father, the Chinese Maritime Customs. But this work, much of it from the distinguished hand of John Fairbank, was mostly concerned with the 19th-century origins of the institution, shedding less light on modern times. For its more recent history, it was not even very clear where the records lay: the best contemporary guide to Chinese archives, produced in ...”

“... less remarkable, was the proliferation of original minds in scholarship, with the emergence of a major intellectual stratum based for the first time in universities, one of the most glittering constellations of the new century. Burgeoning before and during the Great War, its native development was largely cut off by the Russian Revolution. The ...”

“... but pleasing, somehow, to me. I was nudged in his direction by my graduate supervisor at Oxford, John Bayley, a wonderfully subtle and wide-ranging critic who as far as I’m aware never wrote about Firbank himself. I was embarking on an MLitt thesis looking at the way gay British writers, in the early and mid-20th century, had negotiated the necessary ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”

“... have a memory of sitting there and feeling smug,’ she wrote of attending a class taught by John Crowe Ransom in 1938. She identified as a Trotskyite, placing herself on the anti-Stalinist left along with the writers she admired: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.Hardwick wanted to flee to New York, like ‘a provincial in Balzac, yearning ...”

“... between the Minister of State and the Prefect, to whom M. de Sérisy pointed out that the major interests of the country sometimes required secret illegalities, crime beginning only when State means were applied to private interests.If ever a man feels the sweetness, the utility of friendship, must it not be that moral leper called by the crowd a ...”

“... of the most striking examples described by Professor Wernham was the naval expedition led by Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake in 1589. If they had obeyed the Queen’s instructions and sailed to Santander and San Sebastian, he believes they would probably have been able to destroy the battered half of the Armada which was sheltering and re-equipping in ...”

“... published in 1832. Underlying his reluctance was not only fear of reliving the mocking piece by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review that had so sapped his confidence, but the fact that his ‘butcher’s book’ held drafts of the shocked, numbed poems grieving for Arthur Henry Hallam, whose vigour and confidence-giving friendship at Cambridge had ...”

“... We were, I later discovered, driving our way through a book I hadn’t read at the time: John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, wherein the author and his dog, Charley, lit out on the back roads of America in the fall of 1960, in a new GM pickup, in order to ‘rediscover this monster land’. Steinbeck is precise and prescient about ...”