“... by Alfred Cobban, Baker’s PhD adviser; in France by François Furet, his future colleague at Chicago.) For theoretical inspiration they turned to the likes of Condorcet and the Abbé Sieyès, who tried to carve out democratic constitutions that put checks on both centralised power and the tyranny of popular will, or to Benjamin Constant, who blamed the ...”

“... used for umpteen films, relics of which are scattered through its cold, damp and listed rooms. Judy Egerton at the National Gallery tells me that Breakspears was once the childhood home of Elizabeth Stephen, the bride of William Hallett, who together constitute Gainsborough’s Morning Walk, and that Reynolds’s Captain Tarleton used to hang in the ...”

“... I said: “Listen, I’ve travelled every road in this here land/… I’ve been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota,/Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota,/Wichita, Tulsa, Ottawa, Oklahoma,/Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma,/Bangor”,’ etc, ad nauseam. Along the way Cash worked with some very talented musicians, and quite a lot of them happened to ...”

“... which time it had attracted some notable members, including Jackson Pollock, Richard Price and Judy Collins. But its more disturbing practices had passed unnoticed by the wider world until the Voice ran its exposé. Even then, as members defected and word spread of the grotesque cruelties perpetrated in the name of its supposedly utopian ideals, it ...”

“... the way different from ‘Those antique negroes’ who blew their ‘flock of notes’ out of ‘Chicago air into/A huge remembering pre-electric horn/The year after I was born’? Well, they were in Chicago for a start, not Loughborough. Wanting so much for him to be other, one is forced against every inclination to ...”

“... of readings and public talks over the next nine months, in California, Washington, Minnesota, Chicago, Buffalo and Providence – in all, between seventy and eighty engagements. And he wrote as many letters to Hale. Like Henry James and Henry Adams, Eliot returned after a long spell in Europe and felt – hauntedly – that coming back was the real rite ...”