“... Roy Foster’s review in the New Republic was entitled ‘’Tisn’t’. But however unlikely his powers of recall or underdrawn his characters, McCourt’s books and manner are engaging. The historian Richard White describes his book as an ‘anti-memoir’. White, who teaches history at Stanford, has traced the story of another post-Independence immigrant ...”

“... it up. Such episodes found their way into a play which satirised Wren and his fellow philosophers, Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso. Wren and Hooke gloomily discussed this satire’s Drury Lane success. Modish wit could be toxic for natural philosophy’s reputation. Summerson thought it significant that Wren’s mantle was inherited by the comic playwright ...”

“... hero; Agustín de Iturbide, the Mexican; Emperor Pedro I of Brazil; and, finally, Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, the astonishing Scottish maverick who played a key part in the liberation of Peru and the consolidation of Brazilian independence. It was not fashionable in the later 20th century to see history in terms of its great men. Yet however ...”

“... and the kind of review Cochrane wrote filtered down to Holman’s readers. In 1825 a 19-year-old, Thomas Giordani Wright, recorded his response to reading Holman’s book in his private journal: Still there is something incongruous and approaching the absurd in supposing the scenes described by a journalist so imperfectly fitted to conceive them … the ...”

“... the words you can’t understand, and that the author is just a little bit uneasy about his own powers of linguistic innovation. Does my love of polysyllabic foreign-sounding words (which were in this period called ‘inkhorn’ terms because they came from people who spent too long scribbling) make me un-English, or even absurd? George Puttenham, whose ...”

“... urban labourers or his opposition to American imperialism.)Until recently, Democrats celebrated Thomas Jefferson as the party’s founder, though the author of the Declaration of Independence has fallen into disfavour because of his ownership of slaves. But as Kazin makes clear, the party of the early republic that elected Jefferson to two terms as ...”

“... feels the need for a new historicism in order to scrutinise the values, interests and powers served by the proliferation of hermeneutic techniques’. Jerome McGann and Olivia Smith are two good critics, both Americans publishing in England, who fall in with Mitchell’s injunction to ‘historicise’. Each regards a work of the past as both an ...”

“... own childhood. It often does. The comic war in Pantagruel is set in Utopia – Rabelais knew his Thomas More and borrowed from him both the thirsty Dipsodes and the obscure Amaurotes. In Gargantua he fits the rivalries between France and the Holy Roman Empire into the tiny world of castle, wood and ford which could be seen from the windows of his childhood ...”

“... of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and Goethe. Here is the Göttingen physicist and aphorist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, writing in 1776, a quarter of ...”

“... well as the real sense of the celebrations was that he was still at the height of his prodigious powers. So it was very much as a public figure that Bloch addressed a distinguished audience at the Humboldt University in East Berlin in November 1956, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the death of Hegel. In tones that would have rejoiced the heart of ...”

“... of granting autonomy to Soviet republics. That Ukraine is now caught up in meddling by the Great Powers is not, Putin argues, a new phenomenon; something similar happened after the First World War. But through and beyond it all the unity of the ‘triune people’ persists.Early modernists are familiar with this sort of retrospective chronicling. Putin’s ...”

“... met in India, China and Japan. They lacked in these countries the military backing of European powers that laid waste to the civilisations of the Americas (and the even more devastating effect of European diseases did not operate in Asia): they were thrown on their own resources. Japan was perhaps their most intimidating experience, after Francis Xavier ...”

“... of Renaissance art, as in the friendship portraits exchanged by humanists such as Erasmus and Thomas More. Panofsky underscored artistic amity for political reasons as well. A German Jew who left for the United States in 1931, he saw art as central to ‘the civilising process’ (to borrow a phrase from Norbert Elias, another German Jew in exile). For ...”

“... fear police reprisals.’ Where are we now? Of course, as an unofficial inquiry, the Panel had no powers: but the incriminating document was sent for information to the Greater Manchester Police and the Avon and Somerset inquiry. It received extensive coverage in the press and on television. A letter from Deputy Chief Constable John Stalker to one programme ...”

“... ask him what the town was like in the 1970s, when the trade unions were at the height of their powers. ‘Birkenhead and Liverpool were thriving. You had Tate and Lyle. Fords. Massey Ferguson. The docks were doing great. Vauxhall Motors were permanently in the dole office in Birkenhead and Ellesmere Port, recruiting. People weren’t millionaires, but they ...”