“... its strange and extreme silentness’. Coleridge wrote this line in 1798, a couple of years before John Marsh finished the first part of his History of My Private Life, and a reading of ‘Frost at Midnight’, along with some of the other ‘Conversation Poems’ – ‘The Aeolian Harp’, ‘This Lime-tree Bower My Prison’, ‘The Nightingale’, for ...”

“... publication in New York; the great Hebrew literary journal, Ha-Shiloah, was launched in Odessa; Simon Dubnov formulated his theory of Jewish Diaspora autonomism in the first of his Letters on Old and New Judaism; and Freud (already writing The Interpretation of Dreams) joined the Bnai Brith chapter in Vienna. The second half of Harshav’s book is devoted ...”

“... so is familiar with the ‘Blue Hotel’, the police headquarters in Johannesburg otherwise called John Vorster Square. And then a black man fell out of the sky. He came flying through a fifth floor window, landed at our feet in a spray of glass, and lay there like an upturned tortoise, feebly waving his arms in the air. I ran over and knelt beside him, but I ...”

“... of the ‘failure of Modern architecture’ has been a lucrative occupation for the likes of Simon Jenkins, but unlike Jenkins, Richards was the Great Insider. As he said in ‘The Hollow Victory’, he was ‘in the middle of the campaign for modern architecture’, and sure enough, among the illustrations to Unjust Fella, there is a group photograph of ...”

“... Racism is discussed entirely in theoretical terms by two of the contributors, Antony Flew and John Marks, and ignored or quickly dismissed by most others. Roger Scruton side-steps it and attacks the myth of cultural pluralism. No minority complaint is accorded any legitimacy. We are told that during the Second World War white American GIs were warned that ...”

“... and far worse than London, were the new industrial ones. Analysing fertility and mortality rates, Simon Szreter and Anne Hardy judge that in places such as these the 1830s and 1840s were probably the ‘worst ever decades for life expectancy since the Black Death’; and they repaint the ever pathetic picture of ‘relentless youthfulness’, of a ...”

“... 1950s, and splendid articles on why London taxi-drivers became natural recruits to Thatcherism (by John Davis) and on how neoliberal interests and institutions successfully targeted trade unionists as the enemy within (by Ben Jackson). None of the essays has much truck with grand theory; their authors are no more likely to cite the contributors to the Joyce ...”

“... administration. In an Oval Office meeting on 5 October 1971, the secretary of the treasury, John Connally, described the bill Chile presented to Anaconda and Kennecott as a ‘gauntlet’. ‘Now, it’s our move.’ It was then that Nixon said he decided ‘to give Allende the hook’. Henry Kissinger returned to a pre-FDR maturity/immaturity test of ...”

“... from procuring slaves for New Spain to Arctic whaling. (In a similar way, the Darien Company and John Law’s Mississippi Company had seduced the Scottish and French states into backing failed colonies.) The ‘Bubble Act’ of 1720 neither prevented the bursting of the South Sea Company’s bubble when its overvalued shares collapsed in price nor stopped ...”

“... might fantasise about what it was like, but to go further was dangerous. In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped out in the cradle by a negligent ...”

“... Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly allegoric figures on its ornamental title-page – a figure clad in a Roman costume and crowned with ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... to get rid of Wilson, but it was interrupted by a message to call at Number 10 immediately. The simon-pure doctor abandoned his knife, fork and napkin (not to mention Mr MacLennan) and made his way up Whitehall, where the man he was plotting to bring down proceeded to offer him the post of Minister for the Navy. He accepted. Dr Owen records that this was ...”

“... simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of ...”

“... had dabbled in professional music and drama, taking leading roles in a Harlem production of Simon the Cyrenian and a play about voodoo called Taboo, and singing bass with the Four Harmony Kings in the Broadway musical, Shuffle along. In 1922 he had gone to England to appear in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s production of Voodoo. There is something diagnostic ...”