“... States, still regarded in China as Enemy Number One, where two professors – Perry Link and Andrew Nathan – agreed to translate and edit the documents. Both men have been banned from China so, if this is a deliberate leak, they are an improbable choice. Perry Link, an expert on Chinese literature, was a close associate of Professor Fang Lizhi, the ...”

“... an Australian (Geraint Jones), a South African (Kevin Pietersen), even a genuine public schoolboy (Andrew Strauss), all coached by a white Zimbabwean (Duncan Fletcher), many having previously been schooled by an Australian (Rodney Marsh). No wonder the two sides get on so well together. The one moment this summer when genuine antipathy seemed to spring up ...”

“... mainstream French democracy than the American-style ‘populism’ practised by politicians from Andrew Jackson to George W. Bush. The word populiste is a deadly insult, most recently deployed by socialists and Chiraquiens alike against anyone who dares interpret the result of the referendum on the European Constitution as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... kind. Officers of crack regiments disliked postings to the social death of factory towns. Captain George Brummell, learning that his regiment, the Tenth Light Dragoons, was to be sent north, sought permission of his colonel, the Prince of Wales, to resign his commission: ‘Think, your Royal Highness – Manchester!’ To which the Prince replied: ‘Oh, by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”