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“... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... sure enough, Sam Fuller shows up in Godard’s films six years later, in Pierrot le Fou, where le grand Sam appears as a party guest to define film as ‘like a battleground. Yes ... Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word ... Emotion.’ Fuller, we have been told, is in Paris to make a movie of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. At the time, Godard ...”

“... a radical departure from the way we have traditionally viewed our reciprocal relationships. David Marquand, in what is properly the opening essay of the book, argues that hitherto the Left has been possessed by the same ‘reductionist individualism’ as the Right. The result was a ‘paradox’: social democracy could exist only within communitarian ...”

“... to the friends who have been ignored during his obsessively protracted building of a place grand enough to entertain them adequately: but the apology, dignified and ceremonious, has more than a hint of quasi-Yeatsian self-justification. And in the ‘Price of Stone’ sequence itself (a series of 50 Shakespearean sonnets spoken in the personae of ...”

“... a quintessential experience with their fellow Americans. As it turned out, not even the terrible David Letterman managed to squeeze off a burst about Mr Simpson or anything related to the trial. The evening was, as some magazines have taken to claiming on their covers, ‘100 per cent O.J.-free’. In truth, the industry does not quite know what to make of ...”

“... than Thompson could provide. (Gold Medal signature-writers of the time included John D. MacDonald, David Goodis and that thriller writer’s thriller writer, Peter Rabe.) So during the late Fifties, when most of his proposed literary projects couldn’t find a buyer, Thompson went on to do some of his best work for Stanley Kubrick’s early films, The Killing ...”

“... but also loved them. His description of Carlyle is loving: Carlyle came – sat some time. Grand, good old man, kindest & best – Described being blown down the Embankment, like an egg-shell – so frail, yet so little susceptible of the bleak bitter cold. Dickens makes out that Podsnappery is founded in ignorance and narrowness. Mr Podsnap simply ...”

“... Haughton argues that Hill resists the temptation to succumb to ‘his glamorous rhetoric and grand style’, it is significant that none of the other contributors to this collection of critical essays raises the difficult political issues implicit in the poetry. Haughton’s fellow contributors all believe in the magical transcendence of art and the ...”

“... a Prince of Wales party, and fallen for her. She was 14 years younger, romantic, destined for some grand match. But the surgeon’s feelings may not have escaped her attention. What more natural than, like an adroit beggarmaid, to seek out in hard times the homely court of this Aesculapian Cophetua, and place herself under his protection? Lady Agnes’s ...”

“... Jeff Koons, and his inflated cast of cuddly bunnies and miniature blown-glass bimbos, as a not so grand finale. In between, we have everything from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cole to Thomas Eakins to Thomas Hart Benton; from Mary Cassatt to Georgia O’Keeffe to Eva Hesse; from the Shakers’ minimalism (good) to that of Barnett Newman (bad); from ...”

“... more like trying to pick the winner of a race run on the flat, like the Derby, than punting on the Grand National, where one of the favourites could easily fall at Becher’s Brook. But for a late and largely undetected Labour surge in the run-up to the 2017 general election, Theresa May might now be steering us through the Covid-19 crisis: trusted, sensible ...”

“... were opinion formers like Joseph Addison, who airbrushed out Milton’s regicidal politics, or David Garrick, who turned Shakespeare from upstart crow into national bard; there were theoreticians of ‘original composition’ like Edward Young, who set a premium on the rejection of classical models; there were book-trade entrepreneurs whose huge poetry ...”

“... debate between historical experts. Now they listen to the platitudes of Simon Schama or watch David Starkey astride the gun barrel of a tank pontificating about Henry VIII. Blair Worden, leading revisionist and elder statesman of 17th-century political history, is on record as worrying that ‘public life has never been less historically conscious or ...”

“... Or Jonathan Lethem’s stoned underachievers, with their mad ideas that turn out to be right. David Foster Wallace gave us protagonists who shunned the physical world in favour of the knottier, more intractable challenges of the mind; George Saunders offers comic heroes who fail excellently. Turn the book over, lift up the flap. We don’t look too bad in ...”