“... in the pursuit of glory. Time three hours. Very intimate and baffling.’ Frost was entitled to crow. A year earlier, his second collection, North of Boston, had been published in America to glowing reviews, and he was now in demand as a public speaker. He was writing to Untermeyer from his new farm in Franconia, New Hampshire; a few months later he would ...”

“... in British reforming circles and even more so among their Revolutionary American cousins. Thomas Jefferson regarded it as belonging with the handful of books essential for understanding the new forms of civil government being built in America. Capital punishment was not abolished in any of the new American jurisdictions, despite the efforts of some of ...”

“... it was 23 April, St George’s Day, is a wishful synchronicity first mooted in the 18th century; Thomas De Quincey’s counter-suggestion, that the date chosen for his granddaughter’s wedding – 22 April – commemorated his birthday, is attractive. He was one of 39 Stratford babies baptised that year, 23 of them boys. The birthrate was lower than in ...”

“... are the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings of the 1850s, white supremacist politicians of the Jim Crow era, and more recent hucksters and demagogues including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. Not to mention more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over the gains of the ...”

“... of Europe, in the certainty that more than half must be lost, some for the rook, some for the crow, for the sake of the few that made their mark. And everyone who worked there, bitterly complaining about the short-sightedness of their colleagues, the vanity of the news-readers, the remoteness of the Controllers and the restrictive nature of the ...”

“... Melamed, who died well before his grandson’s – our author’s – birth, has something of the Thomas Hardy character about him: ‘existlessness’ is his lot. He survives in a picture, a travel document, an address book, a case for a pair of glasses and the glasses themselves, through which Jacobson sees the world as blurred and vertiginous. ‘So this ...”

“... Cornelia, in earlier years, had enjoyed a brief flirtation with Shelley before her husband, Thomas Turner, carried her out of danger to a remote corner of Devon. Her letters, edited by the late Felicitas Corrigan, allude to ‘dear Shelley’ with near risible frequency; like Teresa Guiccioli, Cornelia Turner wanted nobody to forget that she had been ...”

“... that puts them beyond query. The man who did much of the pioneering work for the Civil War – Thomas Livermore – was himself a veteran of the war who went on to a career in law and business. He was not a professional historian or demographer. And his interest in the historical record was very different from ours: his aim was to show that the soldiers of ...”

“... wretches who had squandered the precious gift of British liberty. Worse, they had the temerity to crow about it, arguing that the American Revolution had purified their political inheritance. But British accusations of American hypocrisy foundered on the unsettling realisation that the colonists were justified in their complaints. From Edmund Burke to Richard ...”

“... the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the vicious pawns of a tyrannical king’. From the perspective of Westminster, the colonials were ungrateful rogue subjects who provoked needless border clashes that strained the Treasury, which had already been exhausted on their behalf in ...”

“... He says that his hand, independent of his will, wrote a sabotaged ending in which the witch-crow known as the Morrigan ‘went up to the room where Colin was and wrung the little bugger’s neck’. After this fantasy desecration he was able to finish the book, but not to write another instalment. This seems hard on Colin and Susan. A more inoffensive ...”

“... that he was lenient in the matter of his own priests’ sexual misdemeanours; that, unlike, say, Thomas More, he was a powerful combatant but a tolerant prosecutor of heretics (such as the Donatists); that his strong sense of the evil humans can do was more than balanced by his love-flooded sense of God’s grace and beneficence; that his apparent rigidity ...”

“... are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward Thomas’s, Owen’s – rise from the shared world of trench-mud with astonishing freshness. And Gurney, at least, would have approved Taylor’s chosen prelude, a poem by that patron of all things common, Walt Whitman, whose work he appears to have encountered ...”

“... Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies. His wife sings a nymphomaniacal song about him ‘fiddling’, which is ...”

“... ephemeral. Ammons listens to syllables as though he were diagnosing the workings of matter. ‘Sir Thomas Browne uses the word as “fictile vessels”, meaning clay,’ he wrote to a friend in 1954, ‘very interesting word; the first syllable hard, the second oozing over into a thin oilyness.’ This slippage from solid to liquid is translated into analogous ...”