“... suggests he was more than just one of those ‘pure products of America’ who according to William Carlos Williams ‘go crazy’; that he was more like a figure out of classical tragedy, who had stumbled into colossal error through an overweening regard for his own convictions, and lived to regret it.In 2012 a non-profit called Planting Peace bought a ...”

“... and endure’.In fairness, Heaney is hardly the only poet to wring himself thus. In this century, William Carlos Williams was also obsessed with howBeauty should make us paupers,should blind us, rob us – for itdoes not feed the sufferer.Equally, the world that Heaney has been enduring since the mid-Sixties has often exerted a despotic pressure. He is not ...”

“... that sprang up in Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s.) The killings in the title of Marlon James’s novel – a novel that’s built around the attempt on Marley’s life much as Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) are built around the Kennedy assassination – turn out, after ...”

“... such as Pennsylvania, were simply proprietary enterprises, with an individual, for instance William Penn, receiving huge land grants from an indebted Crown. Yet even these colonies soon encouraged joint stock companies to establish towns or generate commerce. Joint stocks allowed merchants to become ‘portfolio colonialists’, who could entrust the ...”

“... their say. There are essays from many of the old Partisan crowd, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, William Barrett, Philip Rahv; a compassionate reminiscence from Harry Levin, who was much abused by Schwartz when they were neighbours in Cambridge in 1940; there are Lowell’s elegies and Berryman’s Dreamsongs, and even an awkward commemoration on his The ...”

“... even further. As he says in The Muse of History, he is the great-grandson of the lexicographer James Augustus Henry Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the son and grandson of senior civil servants. This genealogy of scholarly and public service is important to the book, in which questions of kinship and filiation – whether of ...”

“... post-feudal Indian middle class and members of the British scholarly and administrative classes. William Jones, whose researches at the Fort William College in Calcutta were largely responsible for inaugurating Orientalist scholarship and the reconstruction of Indian history, wore native clothes made of muslin in the heat ...”

“... and the Riviera. Stephen Crane’s birthplace is now a children’s playground in New Jersey, William Faulkner’s a Presbyterian parsonage. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States, from which these titbits come, provides further unwitting refutations of its own project, which is to fix American writers in their proper locales: ‘It ...”

“... of Cromwell? Is it a matter of mere chance that we will have to wait for the accession of Prince William to find the first descendant of Oliver Cromwell to wear the English Crown? The loyal addresses to Richard Cromwell, though a potentially suspect source, do not suggest that the Protectorate fell because of any lack of hold on public opinion. Indeed, it is ...”

“... nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth of the age had culminated in clashes between a 15,000-strong mob and a detachment of the National Guard. Nowadays the neighbourhood hardly looks like the front line in ...”

“... A.J.P. Taylor, Maurice Cowling, Lawrence Stone and the Cerberus of Scottish historiography, William Ferguson. But if the softer, gentler Trevor-Roper outlived many – though by no means all – of his foremost adversaries, their pupils and heirs had not forgotten the scars borne by the previous generation. In his battle with Trevor-Roper over matters ...”

“... in the DNB from beyond the grave. Also excluded from the original edition were, for example, William Jardine and Sir James Matheson, the founders of the famous company which bear their name. Their refusal to agree to Chinese requests to desist from the opium trade led to the disgraceful Opium War of 1840-2, a war which ...”

“... last letter to his beloved wife. Harshest and most searing of all, however, are the cartoons. In James Gillray’s Un petit souper à la Parisienne, published in 1792, a scraggy woman bastes the body of a baby dangling over a fire; her companions squat bare-arsed on the dismembered carcasses of their victims, feasting on their flesh. One devours an ...”

“... Born too late – and that was the least of it – to be James Fenton, I cannot claim to have spent the fall of Saigon hitchhiking to President Nguyen Van Thieu’s palace aboard a Northern Vietnamese tank. By the time I reached the city, more than a decade after the President’s government was toppled, I was also a little late to experience the thrill that the poet and war correspondent had felt in living through its death throes ...”

“... had originated nearly two decades earlier, Ginsberg confided, in an auditory hallucination of William Blake intoning ‘Ah, Sunflower’ to him ‘like God had a human voice’. James Campbell, who introduces a note of irony into his reworking of twice-told Beat tales, refers to Ginsberg’s historic undergraduate ...”