“... Murray types his poems with a crooked finger, broken in a childhood struggle with his cousin George. As Murray’s depressed mother suffered successive miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, she grew increasingly stern towards her only son, who was sent to live in a boarding house at Taree, New South Wales, where he went to secondary school. He was there ...”

“... from British India. Some also campaigned against economic exploitation. ‘If we are honest,’ George Orwell wrote, ‘it is true that the British are robbing and pilfering Burma quite shamelessly.’ Firms in London and Glasgow grew fat on profits from the export of Burmese rice, oil and timber while ordinary villagers sank into poverty. In 1937 Burma was ...”

“... bankruptcy of the old establishment is difficult to exaggerate. In May 1941, Liddell records Lloyd George’s manoeuvres for a separate peace with Germany – all fatally undermined by his determination that this should also secure his re-entry to the cabinet on his terms. One notes with despair the presence in Lloyd ...”

“... he makes a good and still largely unfashionable case for Victorian ‘restorers’, notably Sir George Gilbert Scott. It emerges that the villains were often the relevant Dean and Chapter, who then told some shocking lies in order to transfer responsibility from themselves to their architects. He very reasonably asks why we should think late medieval ...”

“... fought to restrict the lobbying of state officials. His most popular campaign with both rural and urban voters was for large-scale road and bridge construction. He also revived a Populist Party demand of the 1890s – public storage facilities for crops so that farmers could hold them until market prices were favourable. One of his most memorable policies had ...”

“... that their territorial rivalries were a continuation, not only of earlier forms of gang ritual in urban working-class neighbourhoods, but also of the violent territorial conflicts of pre-industrial village society. Pearson also challenges the belief that the two world wars created stability and cohesion on the home front. The Great War was accompanied by a ...”

“... of the first lipogram; Ausonius, master of the cento; Arnaut Daniel, inventor of the sestina; George Herbert for his emblematic poems; Edgar Allan Poe (the Philosophy of Composition); Lewis Carroll; Raymond Roussel; Unica Zürn, sublime anagrammatist’. Oulipianism, in short, is not cliquish: it demonstrates its generic credentials by being found to ...”

“... cosmic of questions. From Matthew Arnold’s portentous idiom of sweetness and light to George Steiner’s reverent talk of artefacts as real presences, art is a domain of displaced transcendence. It is the one remaining intimation of immortality for those who mourn the spiritual barbarisms of modernity, but are modern enough themselves to feel ...”

“... example, Joseph Addison would write a drama in praise of Cato; why this drama would be admired by George Washington and imitated by Eustace Budgell; and why the latter’s 1737 suicide note would read: ‘What Cato did, and Addison approv’d,/Cannot be wrong.’ These deaths were meant to resonate. While the immediate reality of the final moments is beyond ...”

“... than nature or the human body, led to a state of exhaustion and burnout which the US neurologist George Miller Beard diagnosed as ‘neurasthenia’. Beard defined the condition as a depletion of nervous energy and explained it by analogy to an electrical current: when a circuit is overloaded with light bulbs, it eventually reaches a point where ‘the ...”

“... their debts; consumption dips as workers’ income diminishes, and they fear not meeting theirs; urban economic centres, close-packed and fast-paced, serve as vast disease transmission centres. It isn’t so much a liquidity crisis as a solvency crisis on both sides. The pandemic, too, follows economic lines, as historic pandemics followed military ...”

“... Ronald Reagan had to suffer exposure in the Iran-Contra affair, complete with a televised apology. George Bush, the one recent President who avoided any serious investigation or humiliation while in office, was instead punished more harshly in the 1992 election – the voters found him too aloof, much too certain of his right to lead. Had he been humbled at ...”

“... had already been exhausted on their behalf in the French and Indian War. In his 1763 proclamation, George III made major concessions to Indian tribes and declared the Appalachian mountain range to be the outer limit of colonial expansion. For trigger-happy real estate speculators like George Washington, who had ignited the ...”

“... to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall. Trads embraced a louche, boho scruffiness (silly hats, sloppy ...”

“... evacuation from Galicia. The ghastly French sieges of Saragossa ended with some of the worst urban combat seen in Europe before the 20th century, and as many as fifty thousand dead. After three more years of fighting, Bonapartist rule extended, in theory, over almost all of Spain. Yet guerrilla bands under chieftains with colourful nicknames like ‘The ...”