“... book describes attitudes to pedantry during and after the American Revolution. The plain style of Thomas Paine initiated a wave of resistance to small cliques of classically educated rulers, who might unite pedantry with tyranny and irreligion. The key question became: ‘What was useful knowledge for the new nation?’ And the answer to that question was ...”

“... urban labourers or his opposition to American imperialism.)Until recently, Democrats celebrated Thomas Jefferson as the party’s founder, though the author of the Declaration of Independence has fallen into disfavour because of his ownership of slaves. But as Kazin makes clear, the party of the early republic that elected Jefferson to two terms as ...”

“... his colleague said. Wright was soon 30,000 feet above the Tasman Sea watching the programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) being chased by unknowable agents in The Matrix. Wright found the storyline strangely comforting; it was good to know he wasn’t alone. At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode, but turned it on to use the ...”

“... is detailed in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, concurring opinions by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and dissents by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.* Roberts held that the admissions programmes at Harvard and UNC ran afoul of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which ...”

“... would later call, applying the term to a very different kind of music, ‘entartete Kunst’. Thomas Mann was to satirise this attitude in Buddenbrooks, where Edmund Pfühl, the local organist, refuses to play excerpts from Tristan because of the music’s immorality: ‘I cannot play that, my dear lady!’ he says to Gerda, ‘I am your most devoted ...”

“... which, not being especially carnivorous, we find it hard to dispose of. This year, though, Inigo Thomas, having been brought up on such fare, has offered to take them off our hands (and later sends round a brace in a delicious casserole).7 February. Nick H. rings this morning to say they’d been talking over the play at the theatre and the general feeling ...”

“... Nancy Was President Roosevelt’ (a grinning Nancy replacing Teddy Roosevelt between Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln on Mount Rushmore); ‘If Nancy Was a Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci’ (her stolid features and purposeful stomp sketched on a sheet of Old Master drawings between noble profiles, sorrowing Madonnas, plaintive putti and ...”

“... foray out of town – critics have tended to make it only as far as George Herbert’s Bemerton or Andrew Marvell’s Hull in any case – this study largely avoids the English capital, or at least as far as is compatible with still discussing Cymbeline and some minor bits of Milton. For the most part it shifts its formidably knowledgable attention to other ...”

“... stalled in an improvised cab-rank because there were no free beds. That morning, I’d witnessed Andrew Marr wondering aloud if English politicians would ‘welsh’ on their Scottish promises. The three girls in front of us, exam results achieved, were weighing up, in very sensible terms, their academic futures. They had already decided against Oxford, but ...”

“... the presidential election of 2004, teaches law at Fordham University. Last year, she ran against Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic nomination for governor of New York. In more than 90 per cent of American elections, the politician who raises the most money wins. Teachout raised around $800,000; Cuomo raised more than $40 million. She hadn’t expected to beat ...”

“... lowered. Wholly and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last year, each time gathering in new ...”

“... by Barry Cryer, as one of his extensive and distinguished clientele that included Judi Dench and Andrew Marr. He would ring up and without bothering to say who it was would embark on the joke. When he’d finished he’d say, ‘Well, I’ll give you back your day’ and ring off. The last joke he told me, only a week or two before his death, concerned a ...”

“... of’) and with such comic success that the ecclesiastical establishment was prompted to enlist Thomas Nashe and others to answer Marprelate in his own style. Andrew Marvell’s tolerationist work The Rehearsal Transpros’d of 1672 became a reference point for later reforming satire, and Sperrin argues that Samuel ...”

“... enjoyed hay rides in the back of her ‘Uncle’ John’s hay cart; that she has a brother called Thomas and another called William and a twin sister called Elizabeth; that her mother recently died of cancer; that her father is called Hastings and is a retired colonel. That is about it. This might serve as a modest sketch of someone’s life, but is wholly ...”

“... of a House of Commons committee chaired by the Quaker anti-slavery campaigner and philanthropist Thomas Fowell Buxton. The report was scathing about the treatment of Aborigines in the Australian colonies: It might be presumed that the native inhabitants of any land have an incontrovertible right to their own soil; a plain and sacred right, however, which ...”