“... came from industrialists and businessmen in Newcastle, Liverpool and Glasgow. Without the help of John Macadam and other Glaswegians, Mazzini might not have been able to mount the crucial expedition of his follower Rosolino Pilo to Sicily in 1860, which paved the way for Garibaldi and his Thousand. In Italy, the main charge against Mazzini has been that he ...”

“... almost to zero. There has never been a really successful modern recasting of Beowulf apart from John Gardner’s anarchic Grendel of 1971. (Michael Crichton’s disastrous and vainly Scandinavianising Eaters of the Dead has just been hauled back into print on the back of Jurassic Park.) The only Anglo-Saxon novels of any weight are about defeat and the end ...”

“... issue, and when the defence of the monarchy is left to such characters as Lords Rees-Mogg and St John of Fawsley, things are clearly getting rather serious. For the Prince and his advisers, the last redoubt of hope must be that in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time, this will all have blown over and been forgotten. Like most Princes of Wales, only more ...”

“... very hostile to any form of sex before marriage; James Mill had ‘a neurotic aversion to sex’; John Stuart Mill was ambivalent, but an early supporter of contraception; Bentham defended sexual pleasure while advocating abstention, and expressed himself in favour of both concubinage and – uniquely – of tolerance for homosexuality; Harriet Taylor looked ...”

“... for example, a head as simple as a bean seed.) Later there were American connections – in 1916 John Quinn began collecting his work; he knew the photographers Edward Steichen and Man Ray – and Romanian connections, which were maintained all his life. There is hardly a significant name which does not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the ...”

“... Lorraine Motel, Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on 3 April 1968; Dayton, where John Scopes was convicted in 1925 for teaching evolution to his biology class. Tennessee still stumbles under the burden of being a Civil War battleground (the East was loyal to the Union while the Midwest supported the Confederacy) and the state government works ...”

“... representative, ‘we cannot attack; the Jews might attack us in turn.’ In his memoirs, Sir John Glubb tells a rather similar anecdote. When the first independent Syrian government was formed after the 1939-45 war, the President asked for an estimate of the cost of a tank regiment. A British officer included a sum for a workshop. This was immediately ...”

“... a dandy. During his own time, he was clearly distinct from the macaronis or the incroyables. ‘If John Bull turns round to look at you, you are not well-dressed,’ he observed to Harriette Wilson, ‘but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable.’ Yet only a few years after the Beau’s creditors forced him into exile, the young dandies were wearing ...”

“... on them. The waterfront becomes a place of longing, and Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James ...”

“... that his play-acting nature became a running joke in his movies. ‘You’re just not convincing, John,’ Grace Kelly tells him in To Catch a Thief, ‘You’re like an American character in an English movie. You just don’t talk the way an American tourist ought to talk.’ In Suspicion a crime writer laughs at him: ‘Look at the expression on his ...”

“... generation but he was doomed never to succeed. Partly it was because he wasn’t clubbable: as John Biffen, an admirer, noted sadly, he was ‘devastatingly self-contained’. But, far more, it was the speech that had put him beyond the pale, not only because of the allegations of racism which dogged him for ever after but because the Parliamentary élite ...”

“... Eliot in the Houghton Library; Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Lyndall Gordon’s Eliot’s Early Years; John Mayer’s T.S. Eliot’s Silent Voices; Laforgue’s Hamlet, Mélanges posthumes, Le Concile féerique, and ‘Esthét-ique’; Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature; Maeterlinck’s essay ‘Silence’; Boswell’s Johnson; the OED; Paradise ...”

“... England by Lawrence Durrell and Elizabeth David. His dustwrapper should have been designed by John Minton. You can smell the wild garlic, the turpentine. Rustic excesses out of David Rudkin or Edward Bond, scythe-carrying yokel mobs baying for blood, are intercut with a Paul Nash vision of the falling German aircraft (‘insignia painted on the ...”

“... development or under-development. Ged Martin and Benjamin Kline discuss emigration and identities. John MacKenzie supplies a piece on imperial art. Finally, Marshall, followed by an Australian, an African and an Indian, offer their own, inevitably different, verdicts on Empire’s legacy. Throughout, we are reminded that British power to control events was ...”

“... of a phone when Nora was 80 cost her the excitement of letters coming up the road with John Willie McGrath, the postman, on his bike, and the installation of a television when she was 85 meant that her friends gave up their twisting narrations in favour of Dallas reruns, so the introduction of modern toiletry removed from Moveen for ever the ...”