“... Like most such symposia, The Socialist Agenda is a bit of a rag-bag. Some of the essayists – Lord McCarthy on incomes policy is the most painful example – have nothing new to say. Others – notably, James Meade on fixing money rates of pay, Ian Little on ‘Social Democracy and the International Economy’, Raymond ...”

“... be a second-rate motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in alcohol and nicotine,’ James Bond tells himself about halfway through From Russia with Love, the fifth and perhaps the best of Ian Fleming’s thrillers. This sounds like good advice, but it does raise one large issue: what exactly counts as being ‘pickled’? Flying from London to ...”

“... because he thought it would sell. It did: there were 23 editions between 1481 and 1700. Now James Simpson, a medievalist at Harvard, has translated Caxton’s History of Reynard the Fox into colloquial modern English. The book opens with the lion, the king of the beasts, calling the animals to court to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. The first thing ...”

“... these poems recall the ‘loco-descriptive’ poetry of mid-18th-century Britain, best known from James Thomson’s The Seasons. As Dr Johnson demonstrated, you can cut every other line from The Seasons without appreciable loss. The culprits in Doty, as in Thomson, are monotony of tone and monotony of structure. Doty favours meditative lyrics of a standard ...”

“... a pink babygro with the slogan ‘I’m a full-time job’ on sale in the entrance hall and Selma James, the feminist writer and activist who helped found the ECP, is being trailed around the building by an old white sheepdog and a young black Labrador. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about industrial Manchester, begins with the disappearance of ...”

“... and Country Women’s Organisations, and a decorous affair with John Pentland, grandson of Lord Aberdeen: ‘I can’t give him all with abandon and urgent desire.’ A hundred and fifty pages of schoolgirlish sentiments and solemnities (‘work is the only only only remedy for life’) is more than enough, and it is a relief when emancipation comes ...”

“... of ‘genocide’. An imaginatively anachronistic view of society is opened up by a sentence on James IV: ‘he would surely have listened sympathetically if the deposed Lord of the Isles had suggested the creation of a centre of Gaelic studies at any of Scotland’s three universities.’ There might with equal ...”

“... the novel, we should recall that the Anglican Church was widely Calvinist under Elizabeth and James. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not so far as I know the consequence of a revolution, echoes on into 18th-century fiction, while the great European picaresque novel with its powerfully developed religious strain was, in the hands of the Spaniard Aleman and the ...”

“... The poet​ and songwriter Sydney Carter – remember ‘Lord of the Dance’? – wasn’t the only observer to notice that the 1950s British folk song revival was being accompanied, and occasionally drowned out, by the clang of cash registers. His song ‘Man with the Microphone’ began:As I roved out one morningI was singing a country songI met a man with a microphoneAnd oh he did me wrong ...”

“... she was. One shows her on the veranda of their house in Cornwall, staring down at the plump Henry James, who is lounging on the steps reading. When Leslie Stephen died and the Stephen children escaped to independence in Bloomsbury, Vanessa hung Cameron’s photographs in the white-painted hall: great men – their father, Tennyson, Darwin, Browning, Meredith ...”

“... and, as the New York Times put it, ‘sabotaged the agency’s enforcement effort’. In response, James Thornton, a crusading lawyer, brought private actions to hold polluters to account. In 1982, while the EPA brought 14 cases against industries under the Clean Water Act, Thornton brought sixty. One of his suits was against a meat-packing ...”

“... Acropolis by the Venetians in 1687 is illustrated in Francesco Fanelli’s Atene Attica (1707); James Stuart and Nicholas Revett describe the dilapidated state of the temple in their Antiquities of Athens (1787); and William Gell captures in watercolour the removal of sculptures by Lord Elgin’s agents in 1801. Alongside ...”

“... largely unchallenged. Then, quite suddenly, things began to change. In 1772, the chief justice, Lord Mansfield, issued the famous Somerset Decision, which was taken to have outlawed slavery on English soil. In 1787, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce began their campaign against the slave trade. Parliament eventually voted to end the trade in 1807; the ...”

“... she wasn’t a bit surprised to hear it ‘since you see everything in terms of sex symbols … My Lord, Billy, recover your simplicity. You ain’t in Manhattan.’ She thought that poets were luckier than prose-writers if only because they weren’t generally read and therefore not generally misunderstood. All the same, some of the misunderstanding met with ...”

“... of the Korean War, Winston Churchill was about to step out onto the croquet lawn with his doctor, Lord Moran, and with Field Marshal Montgomery, when Monty asked him: ‘What is our policy in Korea? It is no good making war without a policy.’ Churchill replied with a reference to the President of South Korea: If I were in charge, I would withdraw the ...”