“... as ‘think’, ‘deem’, ‘reck’, ‘imagine’, ‘remember’ and ‘forget’. Actions may be straightforward, but the mental torture that produces them – and which they produce – isn’t. ‘The rest thou dost already know,’ the hero of The Giaour tells the friar who shrives him at the end of the story, ‘all my sins, and half my ...”

“... which also features an eloquent Black pastor, on account of its condemnation of lynching. Sturges may have got lucky. When White left the country to take up a post as a foreign correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that ...”

“... states in Africa and Asia and no doubt Latin America as well (Cuba and Venezuela spring to mind) may wish to consider why the Jamahiriyya, despite mending its fences with Washington and London in 2003-4 and dealing reasonably with Paris and Rome, should have proved so vulnerable to their sudden hostility. And the Libyan war should also prompt us to examine ...”

“... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...”

“... pure form of ‘Stalinism in the East’ goes back to the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Robert Scalapino, a Cold War scholar who came to prominence in the late 1950s. North Korea was indeed Stalinist in its state-run industrialisation drive, and modelled its administration and much of its system on Stalin’s Russia – but so did every other ...”

“... the poet drifts morosely into the evening / which never satisfies him, while sober, / but which may offer the chance to write “about” it.’ Doctored autobiography will no longer be exploited. The ‘I’ of these anorexic pamphlets will be replaced by the avuncular ‘we’ of the biographies. (It’s like a small private company being floated on the ...”

“... General Smith’s book speaks of CNN fighting, rather than merely reporting, the war. Indeed, this may well be the first time a major American television news network has so openly collaborated with the propaganda machine of the US military. Peter Arnett, it seems clear in retrospect, was mainly useful as a way of creating the illusion of controversy and ...”

“... American edition inscribed by her mother in black ink: ‘Edna Fischel, April 1900’, or ‘May 1900’ – she seems to have accumulated them as they appeared, the name and location of the publishers changing midway through the edition. A couple of the volumes are underlined and annotated in Martha’s hand. She probably read them during the ...”

“... experiencing old age and bodily decline (‘Diabetes is now affecting both eyes, though what this may symbolise I can’t say’). And for a lot of the time it is a poem preoccupied with poetry: there are numerous one-line aphoristic definitions of ‘poem’ throughout, both weighty (‘Poem as cradle of the unbiddable name’) and flighty (‘Poem as equity ...”

“... of private lives to illustrate his themes. It is in these private histories, he writes, ‘that we may find . . . the unseen threads of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those ...”

“... Lynching Memorial.* And German reparations over the past half-century are a model – precedent may be a better word – for Neiman and many others who argue in favour of some form of reparations for slavery. They seem to demonstrate moral principle in action at a national level. Dressed in its memorial trappings, Berlin today is the Nazi capital in ...”

“... of literary art, when functioning successfully as such, have any intimate engagement with what may be called knowledge?’ – our reasons for asking it are different, and so is our idea of what might constitute an interesting answer. Walsh thought that the disengagement of literature from direct knowledge claims might ‘be seen as the liberation of ...”

“... the Northern Hemisphere would benefit greatly from a thin Selected; but even his slackest failures may be the sorts of thing a poet has to risk to become as original a writer as he now is. He also writes strongly felt verse-essays, expository or polemical: their titles name their genre and topic (‘Second Essay on Interest: The Emu’). These poems often rely ...”

“... see, and represent what they’d seen. (The originals of many of Haeckel’s published pictures may have been wall-charts used in classrooms and public demonstrations: that’s one reason they look like they do.) Specialist students were expected to look at embryos themselves – they were by Haeckel’s time beginning to make serious use of microscopy ...”

“... about this paternalist relationship we cannot easily say. That period of absconding in the 1750s may suggest that he found it irksome at that stage of his life, but there is plenty of more general evidence that he reciprocated Johnson’s affection. He named his first son Samuel, undoubtedly after Johnson, and when that child died in infancy he named his ...”