“... the hands of the population of Canterbury, and his readiness to anticipate betrayal by the English rose he becomes attached to, a nurse called Catherine, are not signs of paranoia: for Daud is a black Muslim from Tanzania, and most of the white locals are either patronising or unforthcoming or directly hostile about ‘coons and wogs and smelly niggers’. The ...”

“... Carew addressed to his beloved: Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose: For in your Beauty’s orient deep, These flowers as in their causes, sleep. Appropriate in its strange way: Carew’s essence of beauty is the opposite of what lives in the work of dunces, and yet Carew’s sense of wonder is to linger on in Pope’s ...”

“... Humphrey won the party’s nomination at a chaotic Democratic National Convention. And finally, Richard Nixon demonstrated how many second chances there are in American politics by winning the presidency only six years after telling reporters, following a humiliating defeat running to be governor of California, that he was retiring so they wouldn’t have ...”

“... and spires of the university city flash past, so near and yet so remote. Until the publication of Richard Vinen’s superb history, the best accounts of National Service were fictional: David Lodge’s Ginger, You’re Barmy is a particularly successful evocation of the miseries and absurdities of the conscript’s life.* But Vinen, who was born in 1963, when ...”

“... and invasion plans. Yet the government wasn’t of one mind. The secretary of state for war, Richard Haldane, remained anxious to build better relations with Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England ...”

“... the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar conservative movement, which greatly influenced their presidencies; and last year’s protests over policing and racism, which were among the largest in the US. The rest of the time, you might ...”

“... of Charles Hamilton and his works that Coker was derived in part from Hamilton’s elder brother Richard, whose Christian name provided the famous pseudonym, and who, quite clearly, was anything but a lout in the eyes of the author. And there’s a Cliff House character named Dolly whom Drotner persists in calling Jolly, as though to superimpose mood over ...”

“... that a poet must be either in the canon or not in it – poets such as John Clare, Thomas Hood, Richard Corbett, Henry Carey, and pre-eminently Christina Rossetti. Paulin has some inspired choices from her, alive to her inspiration in such very different poems as ‘I caught a little ladybird’ and ‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children’. This ...”

“... the more so in that Heidegger would lecture at seven in the morning, while Hartmann never rose before midday and only flourished after midnight. Moreover, the circumstances of a young privatdozent were severe: a meagre salary had to be eked out by tuition money, and tuition money depended wholly on the skill of the tutor in attracting pupils. In any ...”

“... of entries, including nested compounds and phrases, was 509,960; in the second edition the figure rose to 562,550; when the third appears, the figure may be close to 800,000.) To keep the Supplement from becoming unwieldy Burchfield could only use his judgment. ‘We have kept constantly before us the opposing concepts of permanence and ephemerality,’ he ...”

“... skills offer them the same possibilities? According to Chesterton, ‘twenty million young women rose to their feet and said: “We will not be dictated to,” and immediately became shorthand typists.’ But they had also found a skill that afforded them a better wage than factory work, improved conditions, and, if they were so inclined, the opportunity to ...”

“... Christ’s Hospital to St John’s. After Oxford, he became a schoolmaster; during the war, he rose from lance-corporal in the Intelligence Corps to captain in the Education Corps. While Jay was using the City page of the Daily Herald to make propaganda against appeasement, Stewart was teaching economics to sixth-formers; while Jay was helping to set up ...”

“... in all men and women. Economic, political and spiritual freedom were inseparable: when Christ rose in them, all would reject covetousness and private property in favour of an egalitarian society. In order to fit Winstanley in, Dr Davis has to assume that in his last pamphlet, The Law of Freedom, Winstanley had come to accept the view he had rejected so ...”

“... loyal to jazz since the Thirties, and The Duke Ellington Reader is worth its price simply for Richard Boyer’s magnificent profile of the great man (‘The Hot Bach’), which first appeared there in 1944. It is safe to say that, at that time, in no American city outside New York would nightclubs like Café Society, militantly devoted to the social ...”

“... as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 biography of Pepys, Richard Ollard said that there clings to him ‘an irresistible air of bedroom farce’, with ‘furtive lecheries so vivaciously pursued’. The earlier multi-volume life by Sir Arthur Bryant had done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery ...”