“... Burney and David Marshall Lang’s The People of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and Caucasus (1971) and George Lichtheim’s Europe in the 20th Century (1972). Indeed, the back of Lichtheim’s book announced Lewis’s work as forthcoming, though it then bore the title The Empires of Islam. This suggests that The Middle East is the product of a lengthy ...”

“... the front page of every American newspaper the following morning. A few months later, President George Bush, campaigning for re-election, told voters that ‘we need a nation closer to The Waltons than The Simpsons.’ On the night of Bush’s acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, viewers saw Bart Simpson watching television footage of Bush making ...”

“... do my job without feeling I was always being watched, assessed, measured and compared.’ Echoing George Lamming, who came from Barbados, she writes: ‘Living as I did in the country of my skin, all the methods I used had to be acceptable to white observers.’Black Teacher was met with hostility when it first appeared. Gilroy was accused of boasting and of ...”

“... the circulating libraries for specimens of ‘silly novels by lady novelists’, the future George Eliot found volume after volume defaced by ‘delicate hands’, their purplest passages endorsed with ‘très vrai!!!’ While Jackson chooses Boswell’s Life of Johnson as her prime exhibit of a book that invites annotation, the late 19th-century ...”

“... community’ of Scotland only exist completely in song? Can it live by culture alone? Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a bitter opponent of the 1707 Union, quoted a famous saying: ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ The novelist James Robertson loves this; he complains that ...”

“... on Wes Anderson’s 2009 animated version of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. Voiced smoothly by George Clooney, this fox is a gallant, wolf-phobic gentleman, a dreamer who writes a newspaper column and suffers an existential crisis that involves one master plan, three bandit hats and lots of gear. He doesn’t have much in common with the medieval ...”

“... great COLBERT.’ A decade later, in his Report on Manufactures to Congress, Hamilton reiterated George Washington’s instruction that ‘a free people ought to promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly for military, supplies’; everything from gunpowder to uniforms must be made in America. And ...”

“... and moved to a cottage in Hampshire, in a village called Steep, where he lived for two years. Andrew Sinclair, in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993), includes a few sentences on his stay. Daniel Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an ...”

“... a person of no nonsense: ‘You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind – no, sir!’ In tragedy the significance of names tends to bleed out belatedly, as part of a ...”

“... The right to offshore drilling for oil, which Democrats had held back for eight years under George W. Bush, was granted by Obama without a word of contest. The coal industry, too, doubtless will be accommodated as a prelude to cap-and-trade bargaining, but the recent mining disaster in West Virginia has rendered an early statement inadvisable. Once ...”

“... that the US federal government could on occasion align with Providence, as it had in the days of Andrew Jackson, the great champion of the white settlers on the frontier. Young Harry read Mark Twain, played the piano and listened to Mozart. He disapproved of boxing, guns and Wagner. Endowed with porch-front charm, he was self-conscious about his ‘girl’s ...”

“... of the Bank of England, having just been involved in that same capacity in seeking a successor to Andrew Large as chairman of SIB in its existing form, when Brown rang him up and put it to him. All very good news, both because we (the SIB board) had been trying without success to persuade the last government to give legislative time to reform the manifestly ...”

“... 1913, not 1912; Ramsay MacDonald and Kathleen Courtney and Willoughby Dickinson are mis-spelt; Andrew Rosen gets the wrong Christian name on page 29; and the misleading term ‘radical suffragist’ is used to denote Lancashire working-class non-militants – a term not used at the time, if only because these women did not constitute a distinctive group ...”

“... augury of national doom. ‘America’s history as a nation has reached its end,’ the historian Andrew Hacker wrote in the early Seventies. ‘The American people will of course survive ... But the ties that make them a society will grow more tenuous with each passing year.’ The more common response, however, was to draw comfort, however cold, from the ...”

“... triumph across nearly two centuries of a frail flicker of Clapham Sect humanitarianism. Governor George Gipps, portrayed with careful scholarship and a novelist’s empathy by Roger Millis in his monumental Water-loo Creek (1992), arrived in Sydney in 1838 wielding the report of a House of Commons committee chaired by the Quaker anti-slavery campaigner and ...”