“... Vermont to write Talk of the Town, or to drop off new stories. Kincaid’s second book, Annie John, a collection of interrelated stories, was published as a novel in 1985, followed by Lucy in 1990 and The Autobiography of My Mother in 1996. The protagonist of Autobiography of My Mother is 70-year-old Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother ...”

“... skyline and the French population as a whole fell under the sway of gigantism and gadgets. But as John Ardagh points out in the revised edition of France Today, when Mitterrand challenged Giscard d’Estaing in 1981, the confrontation was between a more traditional father-figure type of politician, a man who emphasised the private qualities of life and spoke ...”

“... both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened Ground. Of course, nothing in Heaney’s late ...”

“... of history the history of political thought has travelled since the middle of the 20th century. John Pocock is often associated with the Cambridge School, with good reason. He took his doctorate at Cambridge, where he came into contact with Laslett, and has played a leading role, alongside Skinner, in the contextualist revolution. Yet his formative ...”

“... understanding of what is personal in America. Willy Loman is a grandson of Tom Sawyer, just as John Proctor is a kinsman of the upholders of the Scarlet Letter: they are each sons of the singer of himself in Walt Whitman, or of the powerful American addressee, Ishmael. Loman bears a relation to the figment and self-projection that is Jay Gatsby, as much as ...”

“... Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken captive. Despite the romance figure of the female ...”

“... that it is often referred to as ‘the Darwin industry’. Although based on the same sources, John Bowlby’s ‘new biography’ of Darwin falls outside the industrial mainstream. For one thing, contemporary Darwin scholarship has not usually concerned itself with conventional biographical issues. (This is not to suggest that such attention to Darwin has ...”

“... Some measure of the ambitiousness of Outram’s undertaking can be gained by juxtaposing it with John Lesch’s account of the emergence of French experimental physiology – a first-rate specialist monograph which, while highly rewarding, nevertheless runs on automatic pilot along the well-plotted flight-paths of the ‘internal’ history of scientific ...”

“... Racism is discussed entirely in theoretical terms by two of the contributors, Antony Flew and John Marks, and ignored or quickly dismissed by most others. Roger Scruton side-steps it and attacks the myth of cultural pluralism. No minority complaint is accorded any legitimacy. We are told that during the Second World War white American GIs were warned that ...”

“... after 1945 and why it then proved so fragile. There are clever essays by Peter Mandler and Joseph McAleer on the rich and untapped sources (survey data, romance novels) historians might use to get at popular attitudes in the 1950s, and splendid articles on why London taxi-drivers became natural recruits to Thatcherism (by ...”

“... Demon Drummer of Tedworth excited the interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings ...”

“... community. On arriving in New York, Phebe and Mary went to live with the Broadway tobacconist John Anderson, doing domestic work in exchange for their board. Later, Mary went to work in Anderson’s shop. It was here that she began to be called ‘The Beautiful Cigar Girl’ and became a well-known figure to men involved in the marketing of words and ...”

“... to give a canonical stamp to work which was more appropriately read within a manuscript culture. John Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea appeared in 1646, four years after the poet’s death, probably by suicide, in France. Its printer places poems to the King at the start of the volume in order to make it look like a piece of aggressive nostalgia from a dead and ...”

“... face an economic typhoon of unparalleled ferocity, the worst the world has seen since the 1930s. Joseph Conrad once wrote a book called Typhoon, and at the end he told people how to deal with it. He said: ‘Always facing it, Captain MacWhirr, that’s the way to get through.’ Always facing it, that’s the way we have got to solve this problem . . . I ...”

“... It was very unfair to those young men.’ John Henry Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 shattered the intellectual credit of the Oxford Movement. The long struggle – first from the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary, later through the radical pages of Tracts for the Times – to state the case for the Apostolic authority of the Anglican church had ended, as the Movement’s critics had always predicted, in total surrender to Catholic dogma ...”