“... Holy Ghost through his mouthpieces Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul, to the Fathers to Thomas More – whose Utopia and Latin poetry might never have seen the light but for Erasmus, and many others – he is surely the most remarkable writer of his time and the most sophisticated in management of script, print, patronage and even the visual ...”

“... names with less familiar radicals like John Learmont and Joseph Mather, whose ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’ could provide a standby for republicans wanting something to do when the National Anthem is played. I would have liked to see Wordsworth represented by some of the more abrasively radical verse of the 1790s; but we are given several sonnets, and ...”

“... Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en passant, the Princeton University Press as a place where inventive, wordy studies in Romantic ideas receive elegant ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... that follow were indeed first spoken by Democritus. In his 1989 book on plagiarism, Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon excoriated the academic special pleading that elevated Sterne and Coleridge from literary shoplifters into masters of bricolage and intertextuality. Their cases are analysed along with that of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, and the American ...”

“... the closure of the studio marked the end of an epoch truncated by the assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King: ‘the climate for an integrated business in a black neighbourhood changed.’ You can see what Marcus is talking about when he says the civil rights movement looks different in retrospect – but not because of anything to do with Elvis ...”

“... Sometimes the poets would get up and dance. A singer in a broad-shouldered suit, looking like Dean Martin or Max Bygraves, would swagger in and improvise verses: these were often satirical comments on state interference with independent-minded Arabs. The poets admired these witticisms very much. At the Baghdad Shooting Club (hard by the Baghdad Horsemen’s ...”

“... glamour and splendour. Among the more solid figures who appear on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not ...”

“... holdings. Painters too engaged in the collecting of drawings, one of the most successful being Thomas Lawrence, several of whose drawings are in the exhibition. Just how little value was attached to Michelangelo’s working material on paper is shown by the fate of the cartoon he made around 1504 for the Battle of Cascina, which was to be the companion ...”

“... with a mural featuring several famous figures – among them, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. At its centre, though, five times the size of the others, is a stern-looking man with bushy, neatly parted grey hair, wearing a frock-coat and necktie. Two hundred years after his birth into slavery, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and ...”

“... and drowsy hammocks’, and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not have been a man of genius.’ Too ...”

“... not elsewhere in Europe? They sought an answer by delving deep into German history, as far back as Martin Luther, or even to the tribes analysed in Tacitus’ ethnography Germania. A version of this model was developed in the 1970s by the so-called Bielefeld School of leftish German historians, led by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, who saw the failure ...”

“... to this? Early on, Howe focuses on the key figure of Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was born in St Thomas in the West Indies in 1832 but lived much of his life in Sierra Leone. Even before the European Scramble for Africa, Blyden formulated the essential problem faced by people of African descent. Should they argue that they are identical with Europeans but ...”

“... stories: ‘Instead of Pinocchio, Joe McCarthy; instead of Uncle Remus, tales of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King.’ Even Alexander Portnoy is a trusted aide to New York City’s liberal mayor John Lindsay, a tribune of the Great Society. In the thick of his erotic adventures, he can’t help remembering how he spent his childhood listening to ‘marching ...”

“... places in the empire. In this new imperial world there was little space for the natives. In 1852, Thomas Wright suggested, in The Celt, the Roman and the Saxon, that the Britons had no place at all in a history of British nationhood. Instead, British racial origins could be located among the Germanic Saxons. Frequently reprinted, his was one of the most ...”