“... and her brother Leo, and a study of the relationship between Emily Dickinson and the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The Impeachers is structured around brief, insightful sketches of the key actors in the titanic struggle over Reconstruction. It begins with the 43 ‘dramatis personae’, including high officials in the administration and ...”

“... on to become a terrific post-Chatterley best-seller. The Place of Dead Roads is published with a grant from the Arts Council: a double seal of Establishment approval and minority sales prospects. In a manner of speaking, Burroughs has finally arrived. Burroughs likes to kick off his fiction in deadpan documentary style, thereafter spiralling away into ...”

“... classical scholars who had received them, admiring the attitude of the 17th-century Greek scholar Thomas Gataker who refused a Cambridge doctorate because ‘like Cato the censor he would rather have people ask why he had no statue than why he had one.’ When he came across some self-critical words of T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom – ‘there was ...”

“... citizens. On 4 November more than 100,000 people – black and white – gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park to celebrate the election of Barack Obama. There, in the heart of one of America’s most segregated cities, they waved countless little flags. It was a moment of unity in a country where the Red, White and Blue is still tainted black and white. Three ...”

“... Briar, Floyd Chaceley, Neal Brose, Pete Redmarley, Ross Wilcox, Gary Drake, ‘Squelch’, Grant Burch, Philip Phelps, Lee Biggs, the Tookey brothers, Ant Little, Darren Croome. There are too many to take in, but almost all of them feature more or less prominently later in the novel, and one of the difficulties of being a teenager, too often ...”

“... her for a promise of safe conduct for her return to Scotland, via Dover. Elizabeth was slow to grant it; Mary was sure that if only they could meet in person, they would ‘satisfy each other much better than they can do by messages and ministers’. They exchanged portraits, a kind of flirtation. Mary sent Elizabeth verses; Elizabeth sent her a ...”

“... a hundred-odd to Galsworthy, the same quantity to Ford Madox Ford, ‘several dozen’ to Thomas Wise, an unspecified but obviously vast number to the agent Pinker, and so on. Moreover, the core collection of Jean-Aubry is unreliable, because of ‘unprofessional editing and omissions’, the latter caused by an understandable desire not to give ...”

“... beneficial relationship. John Rastell, a legal publisher, wrote in 1527 that the monarch ‘shall grant to hold the laws and customs of the realm and to his power keep them and affirm them, which the folk and people have made and chosen’.As a result of this constitutional impasse, James was unable to secure the naturalisation of his Scottish subjects by ...”

“... divided between institutions that rigorously regiment and specialise (university departments, grant agencies, the Research Assessment Exercises, corporate laboratories) and those (far fewer) that offer select scholars and scientists a delirious year off from these constraints with excellent research support, and with the proviso that they participate in ...”

“... be. ‘In the end, there is only this: she is the little girl in the moose’s antlers.’ Alice Thomas Ellis would sympathise with many of these bleak insights. Her weekly sketches of domestic disorganisation used to appear in the Spectator and are now published in the Tablet. A new collection of these pieces, Home Life Four, reflects the most engaging ...”

“... of him. Allon’s funeral was held in the small church at Berwick, near Lewes, decorated by Duncan Grant et al. He’d spoken about what he wanted from the occasion – ‘not a dry eye in the house’ – and the service was scripted as ruthlessly as the final scenes of Brief Encounter, with the one deliberate aim of reducing everyone in the huge congregation ...”

“... that seamlessly combined white power fanaticism with anti-communism. In 1977, Beam received a grant from the state of Texas to build a simulated Vietnamese rice paddy in swampland near Houston: here, he trained recruits as young as 13 to kill an imaginary enemy. Four years later a promising opportunity presented itself. A number of South Vietnamese ...”

“... and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had ...”

“... traders’ India. White men happily took up hookahs, flowing dresses and local lovers. His father, Thomas Brooke, a prosperous High Court judge in the service of the East India Company, had a local mistress and an illegitimate child, for whom he provided in his will, and Mrs Brooke was herself almost certainly illegitimate and may have been Eurasian. ...”

“... they were published with immense success in 1590 as illustrations (engraved by Theodor de Bry) to Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia – suggests that what was made as a record was used as advertising. The Report was issued in German, Latin and French editions as well as in English. That Harriot and White’s book was ...”