“... communion as well as of class. In a study which includes the narrow sect of the Close Brethren of North-East Scotland, reputed today, perhaps untruly, to indulge in contemporary culture only through television-sets installed in cupboards, the doctrinaire Free Presbyterian communities of the Long Island, as well as women gutters who had their own way of life ...”

“... illuminate the text, so that John O’Leary (revolutionary), Daniel Crilly (Irish Party Member for North Mayo) and Fanny Parnell (patriotic poet and sister of Charles Stewart) take on an almost fictive existence, like characters in a novel. Herbert Horne and Yeats’s view of him, Yeats’s ‘hushed, musical, eerie’ manner of speaking on that night in ...”

“... of 18th-century Masonry, but their tentative conclusions are at odds with Piatigorsky’s thesis. Paul Monod thinks that the message of restoration underpinning Masonic ritual – the rebirth in every Master Mason of King Solomon’s murdered builder Hiram Abiff – proved congenial to English Jacobites, while Philip Jenkins detects a distinctive Jacobite and ...”

“... Carlyle’s writings, with special attention paid to their political thought’, and Paul Johnson, whose high-pastiche polemic, Wake Up Britain! A Latter-Day Pamphlet (1994), was resolutely slept through. The Carlylean inflection can also be heard in the newspapers and magazines with which these writers are associated: the two Mails, the two ...”

“... be compatible with nominal British sovereignty or even continued Protestant supremacy in the North? It isn’t clear that British politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as ...”

“... dance of the intellect, if you will, and in these qualities have an affinity with the painting of Paul Klee. His syntax plays a critical role, with its orderings, the alternating presences and absences, its copulae or want of; clauses gone floating from the main substantive and verb; periodicity, abrupt declarative bursts. The poems have a tense, torqued ...”

“... march – swastikas flying – through a Jewish neighbourhood in Skokie, Illinois (a village just north of Chicago), where many Holocaust survivors lived. Faced with the prospect of a Nazi march, the Skokie village board had passed ordinances banning parades with military-style uniforms, banning the distribution of pamphlets promoting the hatred of any group ...”

“... Harold Acton and John Lehmann, were Old Etonians. The first million-selling paperback was Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters in 1956, while Kingsley Amis received £100 for Lucky Jim. There is a wonderful description by a friend of Virginia Woolf’s who arrived at her flat to find Woolf and Edith Sitwell, between whom relations were somewhat ...”

“... salute to a crowd of thirty thousand inside and outside Madison Square Garden, eclipsing Paul Robeson and Dean Acheson. An awestruck young Alistair Cooke reported in the Guardian that ‘he looks like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint ...”

“... a seemingly impossible 60-day voyage, sailing a six-log raft fifteen hundred miles from their north-eastern village to Rio to dramatise their demand for social reform. Thus, Welles managed to lose the sympathy of the Brazilian regime as well as the support of his studio, RKO, which underwent its own palace coup and, in the summer of 1943, pulled the plug ...”

“... recasting of relations with Washington, until Bush placed Iran in the ‘axis of evil’ alongside North Korea and Saddam’s Iraq. Obama, too, recognised Soleimani as an adversary who might eventually become a partner, if not an ally.Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who lobbied for Soleimani’s assassination against the advice of Trump’s ...”

“... Arthur Rimbaud wrote the works and letters attributed to him. Or that he was born in 1854 in north-eastern France and died in Marseille in 1891, having spent the latter part of his life in Africa. Or that he was a teenage poet who stopped writing when he was twenty. But then what is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems ...”

“... involves placing Asia and the rising sun at the top and disregarding the compass point of the North. Once in India, Roe had to quickly reconsider the likelihood of England’s being feared as ‘a terror to all nations’. The Mughal emperor ruled around a hundred million people. A few years earlier, an EIC merchant called William Hawkins had fairly ...”

“... text has been held genuine by a Semitic philologist (Cyrus Gordon). Superior literacy has rendered North America more prolific in pre-Columbian testimonies. About ninety years ago, a runic inscription was dislodged from the roots of a tree in rural Minnesota: a party of Norsemen (both male and female) had got that far in the year 1362. Until recently the stone ...”