“... 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 ...”

“... and making the occasional foray out of town – critics have tended to make it only as far as George Herbert’s Bemerton or Andrew Marvell’s Hull in any case – this study largely avoids the English capital, or at least as far as is compatible with still discussing Cymbeline and some minor bits of Milton. For the ...”

“... of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights that were much ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and feminists. On his mother’s side, Schlesinger was a Mayflower Wasp who claimed descent from George Bancroft, the Michelet of American historical writing. His father was a Midwest-born social historian with a German-Jewish background, for whom the prairie populism of the turn of the century was still an animating inspiration. Arthur Senior and Elizabeth ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an oafish Thackeray, and Dickens’s biographer John Forster, who SHOUTS IN CAPITALS, as well as George Cruikshank the angry cartoonist.Male novelists, however, are peripheral to The Fraud. At its centre is the strange case of the Tichborne Claimant, which dominated the news and the popular imagination through two immensely long trials in the early ...”

“... 1671; had to shift households and sell many of his books. He travelled to Paris with his friend George Ent, where he suffered ‘a terrible attack of piles’. More than anything else, he collaborated with other antiquaries, riding across Surrey to contribute to John Ogilby’s county survey; answering Anthony Wood’s hail of questions (‘What is Francis ...”

“... this took a menacing turn. On the morning of 14 August 1765, Bostonians discovered an effigy of Andrew Oliver, a local worthy who had applied for the post of stamp collector, hanging on a venerable elm at the corner of Essex and Orange Streets. In case anybody failed to get the message, the effigy had on its right sleeve the initials AO, and on its left a ...”

“... just as a subsequent generation would reveal a sneaking admiration for Napoleon. Goldie remarks of Andrew Marvell, who had welcomed Cromwell as a Machiavellian ruler, that under Charles II he ‘did not wish to unking his prince: he wanted him to be one.’ The radical Whigs of 1688-9 (whose ideas on the right of political resistance are traced in an essay by ...”

“... I said I’d lost it, paid the ten pound penalty, and thought I’d got away with murder: no doubt George Washington would have behaved differently. Now I’m the proud owner of four or five copies (whenever I come across one, I buy it), and moreover Faber had the grace to publish an enlarged version in 1988, Fifty Poems, so the library will be back in ...”

“... overtly political work in his hands than in Pasternak’s (or in the translation of the novella by George Reavey), with Pasternak himself putting in an appearance to comment on the sacrifice of lives to political causes. On the other hand, all the imaginative sympathies here are with those who stand for the preservation of family life. The central character is ...”

“... There are, by my count, too many characters in Redback with not-very-funny funny names, such as: George, Bernard and Shaun Cooney, Ruddles Carmody, Lobelia Sneddon, Norelle Turpie, Vance Kelpie, Montserrat Tomlinson, Bev Belladonna, Hartley Quibell. In fact, for ease of reading (and who wants a hard-to-read comic novel?) there are altogether too many ...”

“... where it came from and why it is worth stealing. And if you quote from memory, get it right. When Andrew Motion, no hero to Amis, says that Larkin’s anthology was meant to promote ‘the taste by which he wished to be relished’ he is adapting a remark of Wordsworth’s – ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the ...”