“... in the feeling that belongs to it’. Some Southerners wandered further from the beaten path. William Brown Hodgson of Georgia entered the State Department in 1824 and, without the benefit of a university education, became the most prodigious linguist of his time. He played an important role in persuading American diplomats of the need to master other ...”

“... influential crypto-Catholic strand of Protestantism best represented by another of his creatures: William Laud, the future archbishop of Canterbury. It is an episode about which The Scapegoat is curiously silent, but it cemented MPs’ suspicions of Buckingham as the cause of all ills: casualties in war, the dishonour of defeat, ‘no money’, the ...”

“... best of Don’t Leave Me This Way – for example, the portrait photographs and captions in which William Yang records in pictures as plain as holiday snaps the sickness and death of a friend – is analogous to the personal accounts Garfield recorded for The End of Innocence. Such records (nearly always accompanied by words which explain who is HIV ...”

“... the 20th-century ‘post-colonial’ novel, in which the characters are mimic men and the puppet-masters are always elsewhere. One reason Izabela, Wokulski and the others are dolls is that they lack cultural authenticity and political freedom. Poland entered the 19th century divided between the three neighbouring empires of Russia, Prussia and Austria, with ...”

“... The weight of analysis which critics bring to bear on immature works of the architectural masters is often anomalous, and nowhere more so than with the first fumblings of Jeanneret. Among the handful of houses he completed in La Chaux-de-Fonds, only the last, the rebarbative Villa Schwob of 1916, is out of the common run (and even this contains ...”

“... few historical figures introduced to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As ...”

“... is the Wilcote chapel, a fan-vaulted two-bayed chantry of exquisite perfection. In it lies Sir William Wilcote, MP for Oxfordshire under Richard II and Henry IV, who died in 1411. He is shown in alabaster armour, with a collar of SS (the Lancastrian badge), his eagle coat of arms on his jupon and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich ...”

“... than his sexuality? Was his religious upbringing more important than his reading of the American masters? Were his sadness and anger more important than his love of laughter, his delight in the world? Did his prose style, as the novelist Russell Banks claimed that evening, take its bearings from Emerson, or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a ...”

“... of the jury’s power to determine its own verdict, free from the threat of punishment. But if William Penn were to preach at Gracechurch Street today, Mr Bushel and his fellows would be unable to afford him the protection of their special verdict, since the case – as a public order offence – would not come before a jury at all. The ink of the Criminal ...”

“... of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ...”

“... deed. The neo-roman writers of 1649-52 were wary – as were leading figures among their political masters – of ruling out all forms of kingship. Like their successors among Skinner’s writers, they contrasted liberty, which is the rule of law, with absolutist or tyrannical forms of monarchy, which are swayed by a ruler’s lust or will. That had long been ...”

“... fabulous bindings stamped with peacocks’ tails and nightingales’ eyes; it has been printed by masters for tiny private presses, handwritten and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a ...”

“... Man on His Horse’ and ‘The Tears of a Muse in America’ (whose original title, ‘A Muse for William Maynard’, signals its origins in a relationship with an American presumably met during his spell as a graduate student at Princeton in 1935) were possibly the poems that led Ashbery to assume Prince was gay. This assumption was strengthened when a ...”

“... degradation worse than death’. Eventually around 110,000 former bondsmen took arms against their masters’ rebellion, equal to the total population of enslaved adult men in Virginia in 1860. Confederates struck back as hard as they could. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, announced the enslavement of ‘all free negroes within the limits ...”

“... Mansfield’ she attacked popular mass fiction, Modernism and literalism, praising earlier masters like Hawthorne, that most secretive of authors. Mansfield was approved for her concentration and sensitivity to atmosphere. Cather wanted to get rid of what she termed the furniture of the novel, the social facts of fiction – the banking system, the ...”