“... as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in the affair. David Leigh of the Observer wrote on 6 January 1985, ‘The intercepted Argentine signals were decoded and telexed at the time directly to Navy HQ at ...”

“... and the aggressively idiosyncratic construction that is the memorial to the family of Sir John Soane (‘architect to the Bank of England &c &c &c’, as the inscription proclaims) in the burial ground next to Old St Pancras Church – the romantic spot where Shelley first caught sight of Mary Godwin, but now part of some lugubrious gardens sandwiched ...”

“... Prufrock volume can now be seen ‘to stain the whole sea’ of modern verse. His advocacy of Scott Fitzgerald began with, or endured through, the appalling This Side of Paradise to the triumph of Gatsby. Stevens, Cummings, Pound, Crane, Dos Passos: their merits and possibilities of development were noted at an early stage in their careers. For two ...”

“... of the household ‘Genii’ – not to mention an annual gift of £100 from Elizabeth’s cousin John Kenyon – the later letters make it clear that the Browning finances were often tight, and that Robert in particular worried about expenditure. Since he had been accused of marrying Elizabeth for her fortune – she had a small independent income, while he ...”

“... wasn’t thinking of anything that expensive’ – was sent in 1987, five years before John Major announced the ‘amicable separation’ of the royal couple. The image and the attitude are a sharp reminder of the mood of the decade that saw Carter’s reputation revive. It was, appropriately, a time when monstrous females stalked the land. Diana ...”

“... fat’. In How They Dined Us in 1860 and How They Dine Us Now, published in 1900, Clement Scott argued that forty years earlier ‘they dined us … clumsily and coarsely, and the women were left at home,’ whereas now they dine us ‘prettily, daintily and luxuriously and lovely woman is at the side of attentive man’. One of the themes of ...”

“... expression of this revised Myth of the Founding could be found in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, which, Slotkin points out, claimed to be an exercise in what today is called judicial ‘originalism’. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s infamous pronouncement in Dred Scott that Black persons had ‘no ...”

“... he set out. What seemed false had become true.Qā’sElid had inadvertently become what Malcolm John Rebennack Jr, in his first work as Dr John, billed as the ‘last of the best’:They call me the gris-gris manGot many clients, come from miles around,Running down my prescriptionI got medicine to cure all y’alls ills,I ...”

“... sunlight, had no hesitation, when his own typewriter was hot, in calling attention to the size of Scott Fitzgerald’s penis. Hemingway had broken with almost every one of his friends and the impulse was native to him.Picture​ is a dazzling realist confection. It’s not greatly mysterious: it’s written in scenes that go from the beginning to the end of ...”

“... above everything else occasions giving scope to the rapid cut and thrust of spoken controversy. John Lawlor, another pupil, has recorded that argument was the only form of conversation ever employed by Lewis in his presence. It must be a question whether such an eristic temperament made Lewis an ideal tutor, although he was assuredly an outstanding one. He ...”

“... The mutable nature of our relationship with the past is the underlying theme of Sentimental Murder, John Brewer’s compelling and surprising pursuit, across two and a half centuries, of the events of a single evening in 1779. What happened in Covent Garden on 7 April was simple enough and largely undisputed at the time or later ...”

“... being negotiated with France, reignited the wrath of the North Briton’s flamboyant co-editor John Wilkes and his backers in the City, prompting the publication of another withering issue, number 45. The new prime minister, George Grenville, and his secretary of state, Lord Halifax, decided it was time to put a stop to this constant assault on government ...”

“... of the proto-Romantic feeling for the sublimity of nature that animates, say, Thomas Amory’s John Buncle, partly set in Bage’s own county of Derbyshire). What is significant is the author’s resolute provincialism – few if any early English novelists had a more confident indifference to London. That revolutionary ideas might develop in the new ...”

“... and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes hoode’ – and attempts at grafting ...”

“... Gerard de Nerval, Terence Malick, lots of Yeats, lots and lots of Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’, Scott Fitzgerald, Delmore Schwartz, Marilyn Monroe, Un Chien Andalou, Hart Crane, Ben Hur... An index to proper names in the book would be several pages long. This all-pervasive cosmopolitan glamorousness, often treated ironically, is most vivid in ‘7, Middagh ...”