“... and would they mind hanging on until the social worker arrived for a psychiatric assessment? Walter Brueggemann in The Message of the Psalms (1984) distinguishes three categories of psalm – psalms of ‘orientation’, ‘disorientation’ and ‘reorientation’ – and in Spirituality of the Psalms (2002), he claims that the attacks of 11 September ...”

“... of political theory. My favourite Indonesian fellow student in the mid-1960s was a middle-aged, white-haired historian called Soemarsaid Moertono, whom we all affectionately called ‘Mas Moer’. Mas is a Javanese term of address, a little more formal than ‘big brother’ but close to its meaning. He showed me the drafts of his MA thesis on aspects of ...”

“... to Shakespeare, may be applied here, by one whose sole privilege is in a grateful admiration, to Walter Savage Landor. A reader would do well to trade in Room’s thumbnail-Landor (‘colourful’, ‘apparently ungovernable temper’, ‘irascible’) and ask instead please for what Room does not supply, a simple identification of the praiser of ...”

“... in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric Haney’s memoir, Inside Delta Force (2002), which described operations in Iran, Panama and Nicaragua, was heavily criticised by his former comrades for what they said were fabrications – but that didn’t get in the way of his subsequent career as a ...”

“... Watson at Gonville and Caius. (Mr Prynne, I’m told, doesn’t have much use for fiction: Patrick White excepted.) Poetry was struck off in the Eighties. Now it’s a special-interest item, available on prescription – like Southern Gothic vampirism, Uzi and crack Brixton scorchers, cyberpunk. Like the rest of genre fiction it is dealt with in compendium ...”

“... of the forty thousand people who filed for compensation. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Eric Williams argued that profits from the British plantations financed the industrial revolution, an argument that caused controversy among British economic historians for more than fifty years. The Legacies project suggests that in key respects Williams did not ...”

“... pioneering Thesaurus of the Northern languages, but again did not pick up popularity till after Walter Scott. ‘Valkyries’ were introduced to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens ...”

“... steam prising its way under collars and cuffs, hot like it was in the summer of 1949 when E.B. White holed himself up in a hotel without air-conditioning to sweat out the paragraphs of his book, Here Is New York. White began scanning the skies in the hope of raindrops, but all he saw was endless blue, and he began to ...”

“... call ourselves Americans.’ Is it a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense – something that is more real than real, a hall of mirrors in which the separation between the world and its representations ...”

“... both grandfathers and his father were successful, well-regarded doctors. The physician’s white coat, as Stern writes, ‘was the one uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance’. Although medicine was in the 19th century, as it is today, far from a pure science, it held ...”

“... the importance of West Africa and the New World to the city’s prosperity. According to Eric Williams, the historian and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, who investigated the city eighty years ago in Capitalism and Slavery, Liverpool went from having a single slave ship in 1709 to more than a hundred six decades later. By 1795 it ...”

“... He recognised us, but he couldn’t speak. Hugh was reading J.G. Lockhart’s Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott; a straw bookmark showed that he was halfway into Volume II. He had read Lockhart before: he had read all of Scott several times since he was a child. The lives of writers were one of his major preoccupations: this biography, written by Scott’s ...”

“... river. She kept up with advanced ideas: she wanted to call her second son Oscar, got away with Walter (after Pater), but was confounded when at the age of nine he chose to answer only to his middle name, David. She had gone up in the world doctrinally, to keep Wales at bay and to counter her husband’s evangelical and downward move, as a lay preacher who ...”

“... ranges of survey data seeking the precise source of his magnetic attraction for the aggrieved white lower-middle and working classes. It will outlast the pundits holding forth on TV, collecting lecture fees and cranking out bestsellers that retail inside dope gleaned, single-sourced and second-hand, from somewhere near the elevators of Trump Tower. It ...”

“... Germany’s Anschluss XI was, tellingly, divided: the great captain of the Austrian Wunderteam, Walter Nausch, had been offered a coaching role if he divorced his Jewish wife, and so fled to Switzerland. Italy beat the fancied Hungary 4-2 in the final, with some questionable team selections begetting the rumour that the Hungarians had thrown the match in ...”