“... were devised at a time when orthographic Darwinism was fashionable. In the 1850s, the naturalist Henry Noel Humphreys suggested that the Chinese ‘never carried the art of writing to its legitimate development in the creation of a perfect phonetic alphabet’. Bernhard Karlgren, in his Philology and Ancient China (1926), led a vanguard of alphabetic ...”

“... the board of Dunlop at the moment of its collapse in 1985 ‘read like a messenger’s speech from Henry V’. As the toffs began to retreat, they were replaced on boards by a very different species. The ‘money men’, attentive to the company’s share price rather than to its product, moved in as the City of London – once the centre of industrial ...”

“... guilty pleasure – thanks to the performance not of Sam Shepard as the general in command but of Tom Sizemore as ‘the sergeant hacking his way out of the labyrinth’. Sizemore is in fact playing a lieutenant colonel, but he might as well be a sergeant (as indeed he was in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan), because we only ever see him in the ...”

“... a fiction designed to mask a satire on what it was like to be a courtier in the later reign of Henry VIII – an experience which, for want of a better term, could be described as ‘grim’?This is an extreme version of a problem that arises with many ‘folk’ tales, and indeed with many stories which present themselves as anonymously authored, or which ...”

“... work is, he continued, try a thought-experiment. Take a truly great writer from the past – O. Henry was the example he proposed – and imagine him transported by a time machine to the present: he would be able to write a novel by Faulkner or Pynchon in a week. But imagine Faulkner or Pynchon transported to the past: they could work all their lives and ...”

“... Nora Barnacle’s hotel might well have been lost on Beckett. He specialised, after all, unlike Henry James, in allowing many things to be entirely lost on him. Like Wilde, he belonged to that group of Protestant geniuses who thought they should speak up just as their land-owning and money-owning colleagues were clearing out of Ireland or learning to keep ...”

“... was an immediate million-seller, and its success unleashed a flurry of like-minded books. Tom Peters teamed up with Nancy Austin to restate the main arguments in A Passion For Excellence2 – a second-try book which set out to be a little more practical in its recommendations and which also tried to counter the macho-zen bias of the first book by ...”

“... in his 1993 afterword mentions Malcolm Lowry, Proust, Finnegans Wake and Moby-Dick; Tom McCarthy in his new introduction invokes Döblin, Laforgue, Plato, Shakespeare, Derrida, Bataille and Adorno. Sensibly neither makes reference to Gide’s The Counterfeiters, published in 1925, whose handling of the themes of originality and authenticity has ...”

“... and his girlfriend Aubade lie around, immobilised, thinking about the Laws of Thermodynamics, Henry Adams, heat death, and the imminent decline of all energy. It is a mostly charming, sometimes tiresome showoff piece, but the way it is laid out offers, as does the apartment itself, a neat diagram of how in the novels Pynchon apportions things on a more ...”

“... British-born professing Jews, of which the bar to a Parliamentary career was the most obvious. Henry Mayhew, the great chronicler of London life in the mid-19th century, was told by a Jewish professional that it was unlikely that one Jew in ten, ‘activated solely by his own feelings, would trouble himself to walk the length of the street in which he ...”

“... few poems are explicitly attributed to other authors). But one of the poems has been traced to Henry Constable, another has been found in Procter’s Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, and I suspect that a search through the relevant first-line indices might bear further fruit. C.S. Lewis says of the charming ‘Hay! nou the day dauis’ that ‘the ...”

“... to a country where the black-white ratio is quite the reverse of what it is in the US. (When Henry Ford, on last visiting his investments in South Africa, was questioned about his company’s policy on black employment, he actually boasted of Ford’s ‘proud record towards minorities’.)Despite Adam and Moodley’s quotation, such strictures do not ...”

“... Rogin argues that American cinema was born of blackface: Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second ...”

“... father James I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a commonplace practice of the age, produced a succession of improbable adventures, among them (as if in compensation for the Puritan closure of the ...”

“... aliens policy administered by the Department of Justice was “not liberal”, according to Tom Woulfe, a former civil servant in the department,’ Keogh writes. ‘That was practised understatement ... There was little support within the Departments of Justice and Industry and Commerce for any relaxation in the laws covering entry into the ...”