“... a clearly labelled bottle of prussic acid might we not suspect the husband? What would Sherlock Holmes have made of the case? That George Maclean didn’t discourage the verdict of suicide lends some credence to such suspicion – and if this is speculative it is certainly not more so than much of Greer’s discourse with ...”

“... reviewed the deportation orders resulting from the raids and reversed most of them; and Judge George Anderson, who declared the raids illegal in 1920, writing in his decision that ‘a mob is a mob, whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers and the vicious classes.’ In ...”

“... platform for his articles on the breakdown of English civilisation, complete with swipes at Lloyd George and his perfidious controllers, the Northcliffe press, bankers, Prussians and Jews. Converting to his master’s Roman Catholicism, Cecil also adopted his antisemitism, which emerges when he remarks in his rather patronising little book on his brother that ...”

“... their many devotees included William Gladstone, Joseph and Austen Chamberlain, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. (A hand-reader pronounced Wilde’s head line ‘very strongly marked, showing extraordinary brain power and profound scholarship’.) The high-end chirologists advertised distinctions between what they offered clients and the ...”

“... nuclear reactor, are essays about 19th-century women novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. The tribute paid to Austen, in particular, is remarkable both for its warmth and for its acuity. Woolf admired Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the happiness of life is collected’ – as it ...”

“... Forster was acutely conscious of this. He began the book when a friend of Edward Carpenter’s, George Merrill, touched his backside ‘gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people’s. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It ...”

“... and bills of sale, Marks and his team of researchers unearthed some unexpected gems. The diary of George Hunter White, a dead Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, was particularly startling. White had worked as Gottlieb’s fixer in the underworlds of New York and San Francisco, conducting drug experiments on unknowing subjects in brothels or at parties he held ...”

“... a fairly short book offering traditional English complaints against the United States. The hero, George Gidner, goes to Dakota in 1929, leaving his teaching job in Bradford to attempt something similar in the Wild West. Sneeringly the narrative describes the girls he left behind him. ‘Mr Gidner seems sort of exalted since he landed that plush Yankee ...”

“... with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its effect on Coleridge. He atones for it by an ...”

“... whether Telford’s was the first to be constructed primarily in iron; it now seems that the tiny Holmes Aqueduct on the Derby Canal, has priority. If the Longdon aqueduct is not ‘an ugly thing’, it certainly isn’t competing in a beauty pageant. It has none of the grandeur of Pontcysyllte: its fascination is in its plainness, its modesty, innocent of ...”

“... sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for doing so). By contrast, in the Civil War, the overwhelming majority who took up arms fought for the United States (the Confederacy having stubbornly resisted proposals to arm slaves until the very eve of its ...”

“... made contact with him. For one reason or another, they’ve preferred to deal with people like George Adamski, a Polish-American handyman and ‘minor figure on the California occult scene’. Adamski claimed to have first spotted a UFO in 1946, having acquired a fifteen-inch telescope for the purpose. Six years later, after reporting nearly two hundred ...”

“... fans’ highest expectations. In American letters I can compare Thomas only with Oliver Wendell Holmes (the father of the one whom Americans think of first). But although both were medical professors and, in their time, deans, their affinity does not really go much deeper than the relaxed and genial style they share: only a young left-wing ...”

“... entered the First World War. His masters, as he himself acknowledged, were H.L. Mencken and George Bernard Shaw. Even the most ideologically liquored-up combatant in the culture wars of the last couple of decades might blanch at taking them as models. The sobering fact is that, by the time ‘the last intellectuals’ were in their pomp, it was already ...”

“... just in time for that year’s European elections. Ukip, under the leadership of Michael Holmes, won a barely respectable 6.5 per cent of the vote. But it was enough to gain the party three seats in the European Parliament. One went to Holmes. Another went to Farage. It transformed his profile and finally gave him ...”