“... defeated streets which lies between Camden Road and St Pancras’. For the English reader, Denys Johnson-Davies’s extensive collection of Arabic short stories ought to have something of the opposite effect. Here are no less than 24 stories by different authors chosen from the entire Arabic-speaking world: Egypt in particular, but also the Sudan, Saudi ...”

“... as South Korea and Taiwan, could have been adapted and implemented. But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson chose instead to claim immunity. ‘I think it’s going to work out fine,’ Trump announced on 19 February. On 3 March, the day the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned against shaking hands, ...”

“... nasty. But it tastes worse when nothing has been apologised or paid for. Both Taylor and Prince Johnson, famous for chopping former president Samuel Doe to death on video, have become pastors, and are now fond of saying that they’ve been ‘arrested by God’ so no one else need bother. One notorious thug, General ...”

“... Mansfield’ by John Singleton Copley (1782) On one level, Mansfield’s was a model career and Samuel Smiles wrote of him with reverence. His wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was devotedly married for 46 years, was the daughter of an earl and the granddaughter of a lord chancellor. A dutiful but not excessively devout Anglican, he prospered at the bar, then ...”

“... of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte ...”

“... erotic novels of the 1720s were noisily disparaged by canonical pioneers of the genre such as Samuel Richardson (though Richardson neglected to add that in his professional, book-trade capacity he had printed some of her steamiest works, including the bestselling Love in Excess). The quiet absorption by later 18th-century novelists of Haywood’s ...”

“... to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s ...”

“... rump? It must be charity. Look at the cameras. There aren’t enough of them to bring out Boris Johnson, who never failed, in all the years of his mayoralty, to insert himself on the television ‘news where you are’ for London: in hardhat, bicycle helmet, scrumcap squashed down on the finger-flicked golden mopflop of thuggish charm. A vortex of ...”

“... sense of the classicists’ case, and its power of longevity. It was most famously set down in Samuel Johnson’s stricture on Cymbeline: ‘the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life’. The whole he sums up in the phrase ...”

“... in its inversion of perspective as Gulliver’s Travels; and as sentimental as the novels of Samuel Richardson, a patron for whom Pilkington provided inside information on the workings of the female heart and the doings of London libertines, and from whom she learned to write to the moment, and to keep in mind new possibilities for a woman’s ...”

“... In Britain, Margaret Thatcher, a scientist, was a rare exception; far more typical is Boris Johnson, who likes to quote great chunks of Ancient Greek from memory.In his original and engrossing book, the Oxford historian Paul Betts, an American who experienced ‘Western Civ’ at first hand, perhaps underplays the classical origins of the ...”

“... it lacked the prestige it now commands. In 1660, for example, the French philosopher and essayist Samuel de Sorbière wrote the following on the subject of the amateur art historians in and around the Royal Academy of Painting: Their great aptitude consists in knowing how to identify the artist after glancing at a picture, then being able to pronounce on his ...”

“... opponent in 1964, the ultra-conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. In the event, Lyndon Johnson was not inclined to risk what promised (and turned out) to be a landslide victory over Goldwater, and turned his debate challenge down. Not surprisingly, Nixon rejected calls to put himself through another series of debates in 1968, when his opponent was ...”

“... In the Renaissance they were barely separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not ...”

“... a rather different way, does the man whose name, age, occupation and family background he records: Samuel Worsham Beauchamp. Beauchamp has been convicted of killing a Chicago policeman, and the next day he will face the electric chair. The rest of the story is about his grandmother’s efforts to bring his body home to Mississippi.Early drafts of the story ...”