“... public recognition. By comparison, key framers of the Reconstruction Amendments – James Ashley, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens – are obscure. Unfamiliar, too, are the origins and back stories of their constitutional handiwork, which Foner ably describes.Throughout his career Foner has championed progressive radicalism in the American ...”

“... comedies turned on displacement or dislocation. The lovers of Athens find themselves in the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone move from the court into the Forest of Arden in As You Like It; Bassanio sets out from Venice to Belmont in his expensive, credit-fuelled wooing of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. In The ...”

“... built, garrulous man in his mid-sixties. A pupil at Gordonstoun at the same time as Prince Charles, cousin to a baronet with a large estate in Suffolk, he combines a confident, commanding air and the love of a good story with a peevish ability to articulate complaints in such a way that aligns his personal disadvantage with the disadvantage to the ...”

“... poets broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme in 1961, the prose versions by John Sinclair and Charles Singleton, and an admirable translation – again in prose – by Robert Durling, which will be published in this country by Oxford next year. Behind this we may perhaps see the influence of Eliot’s famous Dante essay of 1929 and of his own verse, which ...”

“... country that had taken in the refugee from Nazi Austria. Someone had to counter the flab and dead wood, and there was at that time no denunciation from within. Nevertheless, it’s possible to feel that the energy of aggression, the sheer blood-lust, was in excess of the necessary. There is a parallel with Leavis: an outsider (though native-born) equally ...”

“... eloquent speeches from the dock and those in the House of Commons by Burdett and Alderman Matthew Wood and Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse (all MPs elected from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with ...”

“... was addressed was in little danger of becoming meaningless. ‘I’m very glad you like Alice,’ Charles Dodgson wrote to Margery Worthington in 1895, ‘but what wicked wicked sisters you have not to let you read it till they go to school! But perhaps the mistress had told them they had to learn a page of it by heart as a lesson?’ Dodgson is toasting the ...”

“... different treatments, the majority of which were tried on Alice, but most shared the view of Charles Taylor, Alice’s first doctor in New York, that the body should be stimulated and the mind soothed. From this it was only a short step to saying, as several neurologists did, that too much education was a bad thing for a woman. ‘For patience, for ...”

“... their author occupied no chair. The slim gathering of such pieces that he published as The Sacred Wood in 1920, and the still slimmer pamphlet, Homage to John Dryden, that the Hogarth Press issued in 1924, acquired near cult status among the advanced young. His reputation stood highest at Cambridge, where he already seemed to figure as one of the informing ...”

“... her up as Charlie McCarthy’s kid sister. In her impressively restrained autobiography, Knock Wood, Candice Bergen remembered Charlie’s room in the family house in Beverly Hills, with its neat bed, a wardrobe stocked with monogrammed clothes, a desk to study at, a West Point cadet’s hat, a feathered Indian headdress and a sweet little pin-up of ...”

“... images add up: those stumps are accoutrements of a particular culture, but the larger pieces of wood, the ‘rigid trees’, are immovable – and less readable. As the boy vanishes through them – either donning or discarding the blazer – we wonder a bit about the perceiver. What does the watcher of this figure know, or wish to know?Poems like this ...”

“... was too small for its burgeoning contents. Leopold had already foreseen this and commissioned Charles Girault, the architect of the Petit Palais in Paris, to design a larger building, which opened in 1910, a year after Leopold’s death. The museum, which remained a monument to his imperial genius, was also a hub of ‘scientific’ endeavour and a ...”

“... in January 1948 garnered little attention, and nothing sold from a de Kooning exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery in April. ‘Isolation,’ Greenberg wrote that year, was ‘the natural condition of high art in America’, and soon the Existentialist talk of alienation was matched by the political reality, as the House Un-American Activities Committee ...”

“... zone of large mid-Victorian properties divided into flats. I noticed a Methodist church with a wood-faced turret and a selection of hostels for backpacking passerines. But despite such awkward neighbours, and a degree of spillage from Finsbury Park kerb-crawlers, and the all too evident desperation of bruised addict-prostitutes, Wilberforce Road throbs ...”

“... from copies of the book and mounted to catch the eye of serial sentimentalists in antique markets. Charles I, a cloaked and lace-collared dandy, strolls across the park to his execution. Queen Matilda, hooded like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, escapes across a winter landscape. The princes in the Tower are a suspect download soliciting close ...”