“... Itahad, or ‘Unity’. Al Itahad may be no threat to the Americans militarily, but according to Richard Dowden of the Independent it could become a rallying point for disaffected Somalis. The risk of Somalia falling to intemperate Islam – this has been a straw many have clutched at in attempting to explain President Bush’s motives for launching ...”

“... through the Deep South en route to Mexico. In his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, Martin Luther King had called it the biggest segregated city in the United States; it was certainly the meanest. After weeks of Freedom Riders and crusading black children, Governor George Wallace had called out the state guard to help Police Chief Bull Connor with his fire ...”

“... childhood which have been written by men, within a particular mode. She has especially in mind Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, which she describes as representing a ‘passivity of emotional life in working-class communities’, where ‘the streets are all the same; nothing changes.’ More sharply, Carolyn Steedman also chal-challenges Jeremy ...”

“... an eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the King (George V) felt that an extended imperial tour by his first-born would not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love called for the services of the battle cruiser Renown, which used ...”

“... hardest to acquire. It was touch and go. He died in 1940, just before the British Empire. In 1953, Richard Usborne published a book called Clubland Heroes, which expanded some of the criticisms made of John Buchan in the Thirties: that he was snobbish, blimpish, mildly anti-semitic and a worshipper of worldly success. What infuriated his widow was not so much ...”

“... that turned White River and other Arkansas streams into cesspools. Don Tyson, the Arkansas chicken king, poured money into the Governor’s campaigns and received not only river poisoning protection but $412 million worth of tax breaks. Mike Espy, the first black secretary of agriculture, was forced to resign for accepting favours from Don Tyson. During the ...”

“... through the war, though they were rather eclipsed in 1916 by John Buchan’s Greenmantle, in which Richard Hannay bluffed his way to Constantinople to prevent a wild Islamic prophet, backed by Germany, from setting the East in flames. In the real world the Germans were backing a more potent troublemaker by smuggling Lenin to St Petersburg, thus establishing ...”

“... but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or ...”

“... has reached for a thematic solution. She relies throughout on the term ‘meme’, deployed by Richard Dawkins to mean the cultural equivalent of a gene: an idea or theme that mutates and changes in time and place while remaining fundamentally recognisable. From this follows the organisation of The English Romance in Time into eight chapters, succeeding a ...”

“... flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead ...”

“... on the topic, though it is always near at hand. The most surprising contribution is an essay on Richard Strauss, who certainly had spent a long life studying ‘the possibilities’. He set some well-known stylistic puzzles: Elektra belongs to 1909, the same date as Schoenberg’s Erwartung, yet the more traditional Der Rosenkavalier followed in 1911. There ...”

“... were all 3 in bed together wth her at one tyme’. The other half of the bail is posted by one Richard Meade, also of St Giles parish, whose occupation is given as ‘gardiner’. A few days later the procedure is repeated, and two other men stand surety for the fourth defendant, ‘ffrancisca Williams de whitechappell, spinster’. The designation ...”

“... Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate ...”

“... is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his account of the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. The Perpendicular fan vaulting of the master mason John Wastell sits in harmony with later Flemish stained glass and French wood carving, embellished with classical motifs. It is Gothic going on Renaissance. Instead, cut off from ...”

“... out in a group of ambitious black male writers who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked ...”