“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... acceptable face of Scottish communitarianism. His foremost predecessor, the anti-Unionist patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716), has recently enjoyed some celebrity beyond Scotland in the wake of John Pocock’s voyages around the civic humanist tradition. Fletcher is immediately unsettling, with his vision of a Europe of city-states and his modest ...”

“... Not only was there a republican majority, but the once loyal Scotsman was falling into the grip of Andrew Neil, one of the brashest anti-Royal voices in the Carlton debate. Most commentary about the programme was fearfully disapproving: crass, vulgar, ill-judged, a ‘tasteless screaming-match’ and so on. The Independent Television Commission later supported ...”

“... bedbugs (an estimate, surely). Bedbugs were a major hazard. Not everyone could afford, like George III, to hire a man of the calibre of Andrew Cooke, of Holborn, ‘Bug Destroyer to His Majesty’, who had ‘cured 16,000 beds with great applause’. The author does not dwell too long on those Victorian horrors ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... deans, and all the trappings of authority. He had the temperament, and many of the attitudes, of George Orwell, and his family background was similar. ‘Phony’ was a favourite word of his, freely applied to anyone whose status or fame exceeded their proven abilities. Wittgenstein, the mathematician Max Newman, the economist David Champernowne, von ...”

“... An excellent storyteller, he describes very well those figures from the past whom he admires, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the other hand, are little more than caricatures: Thomas Paine, for example, was ‘a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler’. No one seeking a fair-minded account of the American past ...”