“... background to that book he undertook to read the left-wing literature – Fourier, Proudhon, Saint-Simon – that had helped to shape the ideas of the insurrectionists of 1848, and hence of some of his characters, for whom the great political events of that year in Paris come as a catalyst, separating the active members of a generation from the passive. This ...”

“... Last summer, the National Theatre put on Timon of Athens as a play about the credit crunch. Simon Russell Beale was the glossy, well-fed protagonist, a wealthy patron of the arts and liberal dispenser of gifts, who plunges into misanthropy when he can borrow no more and his friends reject him. The production was stylishly contemporary, set in the expensive interiors of Mayfair and Canary Wharf ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was on the point of getting betrothed when he finally premiered King Lear. (She married Dr John Hall in 1607, the year between Lear’s performance at court and its publication.) Biographers have pointed out, too, that Shakespeare had a younger brother called Edmund, who followed him to London and into the theatre business. Did Shakespeare name the ...”

“... when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from which nothing could shift ...”

“... Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors (2017) tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the royal trumpeter; Edward Swarthye, the trusted upper servant of a leading Gloucestershire landowner; Cattelena, an independent Black ‘singlewoman’ living with her cow in the village of Almondsbury, near Bristol; Reasonable Blackman (or ...”

“... John Major has now been prime minister for four years. For us, as presumably for him, it often seems a lifetime, so crowded has his premiership been with crises of one sort or another. Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon not unreasonably, therefore, think this the moment to assess his prime ministerial career; the result is The Major Effect, a collection of 26 essays by a distinguished group of commentators – including the editors ...”

“... three hundred years ago. After studying London hospital records covering nearly a century, Dr John Arbuthnot concluded that, in every year, more boys had been born than girls; each year on record was a ‘male year’. Why was this? We can imagine a mad style of reductionist explanation, accessible only to a prurient deity: describe the physical and ...”

“... squeamish about dispensing with such footling restrictions, left-of-centre figures such as Cook, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith have been allowed to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”