“... is less Ishmael than Ahab by the time he limps off across the ice in pursuit of a white bear); Conrad (there’s something of Lord Jim about Sumner, trying to redeem his shameful past, and more than a little of Kurtz in Drax); Elizabeth Gaskell’s only historical novel, Sylvia’s Lovers, set in a whaling community based on Whitby during the ...”

“... friends climbed over the walls of the inaccessible estate to be photographed, all of them wearing white masks, beside it. Woodward does not include the Broken Column – perhaps because it took a posse of Surrealists to grasp its weirdness. Ruins pull our responses in two directions. They offer concrete evidence, of the architectural orders of classical ...”

“... anxieties of growers and the anger of workers would become irrelevant. In 1897, forty years after William Perkin stumbled on the first synthetic aniline dye – mauve – researchers at BASF finally synthesised indigo. The work had taken years and cost eighteen million gold marks – more than the capital value of the company. Experiments in organic chemistry ...”

“... Their greatest challenge was sea-ice, which has almost always filled the straits, even in summer. William Parry spent the summers of 1821 and 1822 waiting for the ice to clear from Fury and Hecla Strait. But though the strait is named after his ships, he never made it through. Leopold McClintock, despatched by Lady Franklin to search for her husband on King ...”

“... were quick to report that the only big button on Trump’s desk is the one that can summon a White House steward with a Coca-Cola. Still, the story Plotnick has to tell isn’t just about the concentration of power. From the outset, capitalism sought to develop digital command as a ‘broader practice’: to sell it as a commodity. In 1900, an editorial ...”

“... Tupelo. His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the ...”

“... Police raided a house in Lees Holm, a mixed area between mostly Asian Savile Town and mostly white Thornhill Edge. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombers, had lived there only for a few months, but his wife, Hasina, and his mother-in-law, Farida Patel, were local: ‘99 per cent of the community had never heard of Khan,’ a Savile Town ...”

“... is for professional posers and the in-house magazine-stand offers antique cigarettes and copies of William Burroughs’s Ghosts of Chance. Upstairs, there are quilted blackboard panels behind each bed and the colour television is hidden inside a thin cupboard with a cut-out Osiris eye. Light is hosed from a surgical tube and is so feeble that it’s almost ...”

“... sky, mean freedom. Emotionally, ‘Rocky Acres’ anticipates the attitude familiar from ‘The White Goddess’, who is also to be found on top of a mountain, ‘at the volcano’s head,/Among pack ice’, where         we are gifted, even in November Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense Of her nakedly worn magnificence We forget cruelty and ...”

“... Eleanor Roosevelt found her ‘hard as steel’, and she wasn’t wrong: asked at a White House dinner in 1942 how strikers were dealt with in China, Meiling drew a fingernail across her throat. Her superior attitude flowed naturally from her birth in 1898 into the influential Soong family of Shanghai. Her eldest sister, Ailing, married the ...”

“... It is ‘better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the 4 per cent of convicts exonerated after execution are significant enough to justify sparing the other 96 per cent. It was Benjamin Franklin who said it was folly to trade ...”

“... movie – I don’t see too many movies but I try to see them on weekends when I am at the Western White House or in Florida – and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had ...”

“... attended it. His characters are historically real, although perhaps not historically important: William Grimshaw, the fanatical wandering preacher, and his associates, early martyrs – the word is not too strong – in the cause of the simplest and most primitive of trade unions; a cast of six-year-old children sent to work in the pits, of narrow-minded ...”

“... and Manet in the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, as did the American Thomas Eakins in his painting of William Rush carving the Schuylkill River. The point in all these paintings is to distract the viewer from the conditioned simplicity of sexual allegory, itself resembling that of sexual response, so that we feel an equal participation with the sexes as well as ...”

“... languished as a series of one-term nonentities succeeded the popular hero Andrew Jackson in the White House. Who could become excited by John Tyler, Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce? The Senate chamber, by contrast, was inhabited by giants, notably the ‘great triumvirate’ of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent ...”