“... expansion into the Crimea and most of present-day Ukraine had been paralleled, further north, by the partition of Poland after a series of agreements between Russia, Austria and Prussia. These agreements were possible, in large part, because of the disruption of European diplomacy caused by bitter Anglo-French discord. During the Crimean War, there ...”

“... in insurance; wife and daughter; quiet life in Hartford, Connecticut; never travelled outside North America; the usual run of prizes towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and ...”

“... of mutual co-operation’ in response to the virus hasn’t been much in evidence. North sneers at South; South fumes about being caricatured and neglected by North. Glancing through yet another report on EU infighting – ‘the former Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem appearing to suggest that his ...”

“... The sky over North Carolina was showing red the night Sam and Terry decided to leave for the South. The red clouds travelled to Smithfield from the western hills, the high Appalachians and the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Great Smokies. Sam Parham is 27 years old and weighs 260 pounds. For an hour or so, right into the dark, he pulled on the starting string of an electric generator he’d borrowed from his father, until the top of his T-shirt was soaked with sweat ...”

“... Díaz’s dictatorship. During the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when Maderista insurgents from the north and Zapatista peasants from the south closed in on Díaz, Buckley Sr paid for Winchester rifles to arm the counter-revolutionaries. He never recovered from their failure. His biggest grievance was that Woodrow Wilson’s administration had supported Mexican ...”

“... parts of the book concern her fights with various unworthy opponents. At the 1981 Cancún North-South Summit she was infuriated by Third World demands that the IMF and World Bank be placed under the control of the UN – where they would have a majority. ‘In the end,’ she writes, she ‘put the point more bluntly: I said that there was no way in ...”

“... time with in Europe. The manuscript of the novel, completed while McKay was living in poverty in North Africa, was abandoned after several publishers turned it down: editors were uncomfortable with McKay’s casual treatment of queer characters and feared that it would not ‘be accepted by the American reading public’.W.E.B. Du Bois said he felt unclean ...”

“... prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iraq or Iran, as Truman threatened to use them against North Korea, would Blair have followed Attlee’s example and flown to Washington to stop him – and would the president have listened, as he did in 1950? This is not a general history of the early Cold War, but rather a study of how the policymaking elites of ...”

“... representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with astonishing frequency at ...”

“... would face when they followed their elders into France’s mines, working the coalfields of the north-east. In the 1960s, the Black South African photographer Ernest Cole (b. 1940) recorded a medical examination of adult males in the gold mines on the Witwatersrand. In Cole’s picture a dozen naked men stand with their faces to the wall, arms ...”

“... no difficulty imagining that I was imprisoned with my ladies-in-waiting in a damp castle in the North of England, depressed and stripped of all my power, with only memories to treasure. Unlike Nancy Mitford, however, I was too sad and too regal to masturbate.Since her death in 1587, Mary Stuart has caused strange stirrings and vehement imaginings in those ...”

“... far overtakes mimesis; or, later, in the unformed mounds of fat slapped down in front of us by Joseph Beuys. But Ulysses is where the process fully plays itself out, whirring and clunking and splatting and squelching. Ulysses matters most, because it makes matter of everything. Everything in Ulysses is déclassé, or (to use a term of ...”

“... house key to collect the electric charge, which in a thunderstorm in June 1752, in a field just north of Philadelphia, irrefutably showed the connection between lightning and electricity.Yet, perhaps because of his very variousness, Franklin’s biographers often dismiss these devices and discoveries as a string of hobbies, so many diversions from his ...”

“... the country opposition to support – both as MP and as office-holder – for the ministry of Lord North. Womersley sees this as a move away from Whiggism; I see it as a move from Toryism to the kind of Whiggism which it suited alienated Whigs to stigmatise as Tory. Gibbon quotes Burke to this effect, and it is interesting that he enjoyed the company of ...”

“... indications of cultural decline. As the nation went, it has been said, so did its literature. The North American critic Hugh Kenner’s recent book on this topic was uncharitably entitled A Sinking Island. John Patten’s recent appropriation of F.R. Leavis’s concept of the ‘great tradition’ is, needless to say, full of ironies. Leavis was certainly ...”