“... can buy a chicken katsu curry in a paper bucket for £6.75 at Wasabi, or if you have a little more cash and time, you can sit down and eat a marginally more refined version for £9.95 at a branch of Wagamama, where it is garnished with a small salad and a few Japanese pickles. Like many British comfort foods, katsu depends on a fine balance between sogginess ...”

“... And then a chance remark casts the affair in a new light. G deducts that Petleigh, desperate for cash, had arranged to be delivered to the house inside a large trunk. He had intended to steal the silver in the night and escape before anyone woke up. But the housekeeper, Mrs Quinion, realised that someone was hiding there and stabbed at a hole in the trunk ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A ...”

“... their pre-Reformation forbears to study Catholic theology, they were taught the classical Latin of William Lyly’s prescribed Short Introduction of Grammar – the language of pagans, taught with pagan texts. In order to win the Parker Scholarship to Cambridge, moreover, Marlowe would have had to have learned two arts to a much higher level than was required ...”

“... finished novel, Troubles, which took shape rapidly and was published in 1970, winning praise from William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. ‘If I had bothered to look at [my] diary,’ he noted two months after its publication, ‘I wd also have used the “flight of stone steps leading up into thin air”, which I simply forgot.’ He had added a detail to his ...”

“... and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s. Seldom in ...”

“... a brilliant machine for the generation of property rights. Security of title was crucial. As Sir William Petty, that ingenious pioneer of statistics who himself acquired huge estates in Ireland, pointed out, ‘there can be no incouragement to industry, where there is no assurance of what shall be gotten by it.’ Jefferson was the Founding Father most ...”

“... right-wing policies. It is remarkable in these circumstances that anyone wants to succeed William Hague as leader. What should he or she do? The most obvious strategy is just to hang on. The Conservatives are the official opposition and one of the two major parties of the state. The presumption must be that sooner or later Labour will falter and the ...”

“... and of an increasingly manifest destiny becomes unmistakable. Sceptics such as the historian William Bouwsma have argued that even the roi soleil did not always get his own way. Monarchs who wanted to throw their weight about remained as short of cash as ever. Even under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the greatest of ...”

“... as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... of the statement. But when he came to work on his autobiography – in a desperate hurry, needing cash and lots of it, not caring a damn what anyone except Laura thought of him, Laura in hospital with a smashed spine – he had only the cutting to hand, and so embellished his receipt of it in journalistic high style. Of such trivial carelessness come ...”

“... to friends and colleagues; cajoling, hectoring and bullying pieces aimed at his enemies, demanding cash or the public retraction of slurs. He can be flippant, vitriolic and moving, often rude, and frequently very funny (both intentionally and unintentionally). Like another neglected and idiosyncratic work by one of the Ten – Alvah Bessie’s Inquisition in ...”

“... of the earnest side of life,’ Crane’s father writes to him after yet another request for cash. ‘People may laugh at your jokes, they may regard you as a prodigy; they may occasionally buy a book,’ but ‘sooner or later your affections are expressed in beefsteaks.’ Whatever else you do, you have to eat and provide. There is wit in this, and in ...”

“... the 18th and 19th centuries, Pericles sank to the bottom of the sea. ‘Not much to our taste,’ William Hazlitt wrote in the Edinburgh Review in 1816, and ‘not like Shakespear’. We tend now to call Pericles a late work but Dryden thought its weaknesses signalled an early play, even a kind of apprentice piece. ‘A slender poet must have time to ...”

“... maypole, topped by deer antlers. A lawyer called Thomas Morton became the local Lord of Misrule. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, viewed this revival of the ancient Bacchanalia with horror. Armed men arrested Morton, who was sent back to England, and the maypole was chopped down the following year.It isn’t surprising that many New Englanders ...”