“... Jane Austen favoured names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty heroine lost in a moral forest, and Mr Knightley, well, he’s not going to be a cad, is he? The ...”

“... sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for doing so). By contrast, in the Civil War, the overwhelming majority who took up arms fought for the United States (the Confederacy having stubbornly resisted proposals to arm slaves until the very eve of its ...”

“... wing in Place’s day did have some virtually and actually criminal members (such as ‘Jew’ King and Patrick Duffin), and some exceptionally dissolute ones (such as ‘Dr’ Watson, Thomas Preston and Thistlewood). Place probably knew that Spence’s social vision included working-class ‘feasts of hospitality and love’ complete with ‘cheering ...”

“... such working-class heroes as Frank Little and Big Bill Haywood of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Louis Tikas (a union leader gunned down in John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ of striking copper miners and their families), but also recognises the corporate and state industrial violence and denial of labour freedom that ...”

“... might have taken his ten-year-old son to Coventry to see the entertainments laid on for Queen Elizabeth is firmly quashed (there’s no evidence for any such excursion and Tudor family life wasn’t like that), and, as if as an emblem of the fate of all such sweetly decorative fancies, even Schoenbaum’s account of the pretty bedroom walls at the Oxford ...”

“... and his songs are glittering with cribs from everything he ever loved, from A Taste of Honey, from Elizabeth Smart, from Karel Reisz’s films, everything, including (especially) the Kitchen Sink, jokes nipped from Oscar Wilde, Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood. He loved to do versions of his favourite songs by Twinkle and Cilla Black and even by brand new bands ...”

“... is damned after hearing a livid sermon that could have been preached in 1690 to the followers of King Billy; yet the Swinging Sixties are coming. Ma has glamorous outfits and the film has a Van Morrison soundtrack. When he is caught up in the looting of a supermarket, Buddy snatches the latest must-have, a box of biological washing powder. There is a sense ...”

“... about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The usual suspects are close on his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great ...”

“... metropolitan area and on the south coast.Every time I take the long escalator down to the Elizabeth Line, or contemplate the implications of our compulsive burrowing into the radiant future promised by developers, I wonder about the psychic damage being inflicted on London as a living organism. ‘Intercept, store and ultimately transfer’ is the ...”

“... the rude irruption of European adventurers into the New World. In the royal charter that Queen Elizabeth conferred on Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583, she granted him full power over the soil of ‘those large and ample countreys [that] extended Northward from the cape of Florida … to dispose thereof, of every part thereof in fee simple or ...”

“... darkest, he concluded, between 1550 and 1849. According to one estimate, when Henry VIII became king in 1509 there were 139 vineyards in England and Wales, all on the verge of steep decline. The impact of lower temperatures was felt across the northern hemisphere. Farmers in the Chinese province of Jiangxi, for instance, found they could no longer grow ...”

“... Cartier-Bresson. He flirted with the idea of moving to New York, after falling in love with Sara Elizabeth Penn, a glamorous Black expatriate he met at a party. In 1957, Penn returned to New York, and waited for him to arrive.He never did. Late that year, he received a visit from Annette Roger, a doctor from Marseille who was active in the porteurs de ...”

“... correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that Baxter paid greater attention than White had to the racial caricature latent in cinema’s visual and verbal detail. It would be interesting to know what she made of the ...”

“... arguing that the revisers’ refusal to admit any references to the Church Militant, God as man or king, or spiritual strife (militancy again), goes hand in hand with the tenets and practices of deconstruction, since it is deconstruction which sanctions disregard for historical and authorial authenticity, and hence allows the revisers to perform their ...”

“... TV, and was re-released in the cinema to coincide with Welles’s return to the Broadway stage as King Lear. In America especially, the era of the art-house, the film-society circuit, film magazines and film schools began. Andrew Sarris launched the cult of the auteur. His key thesis was Citizen Kane: The American Baroque, in which he described Kane as ‘the ...”