“... sway. He believed they gave him only his restlessness (after a childhood spent moving between St Paul, Syracuse and Buffalo) and his ability to characterise himself as a Midwesterner, a permanent outsider.But​ Fitzgerald’s literary imagination was also drawn to the new decadent urban set: aggressive bonds traders, flamboyant bootleggers and promiscuous ...”

“... spread by the apostles themselves – it is noteworthy that Gibbon has very little to say about St Paul – it was during their lifetimes that it had been spread by the miraculous gifts they had received on the day of Pentecost. Chelsum suspected Gibbon of following the tactics of Conyers Middleton, a crucial figure in all this controversy, who in his Free ...”

“... in the company of a steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future ...”

“... most of the Deep South, and massive migrations of black people to the industrial cities of the North, followed almost invariably by new forms of racial conflict. At the same time, America was preparing to enter the Great War. Wood-row Wilson lay half-paralysed in the White House; the socialist leader Eugene Debs was kicking his heels in an Atlanta prison ...”

“... created by Stalin as a new Jewish homeland and located in the far east of Siberia, on the north bank of the Amur River. Established in May 1934, Birobidzhan was supposed to provide a shining alternative to Palestine, Yiddish-speaking and playing a positive part in the construction of socialism. Supported largely by fund-raising abroad – especially ...”

“... bedtime stories by the nuns: Joan of Arc was like the young saints Perpetua and Felicity in Roman North Africa who faced the wild beasts in the arena, and her torments recalled the sadistic horrors which any number of martyrs in the Golden Legend undergo before they are finally dispatched by their executioners. The parallels between Joan’s sufferings and ...”

“... Protestant intellectual circles in the 1930s; a teacher of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and an associate of Paul Tillich, he worked with as single a mind as theirs to draw the German people away from Hitler’s party. By the spring of 1940, when the lend-lease policy for Britain was first discussed by President Roosevelt and his advisers, Niebuhr was a firm supporter ...”

“... Shakes the Barley (2006), both produced by Rebecca O’Brien, one written by Allen, the other by Paul Laverty. These epic reconstructions of key episodes in the Spanish Civil War and the Irish War of Independence certainly succeeded in stirring political debate. Their propaganda, too, is considered. But, like Days of Hope, they are to my mind inhibited as ...”

“... of that day’s Sunday Times, already on its way to newsagents and homes in Scotland and the North and West of England, was out of date – it carried no mention of the princess’s accident – and got to those places only through a heroic effort of distribution by fuel and wheel and muscle. A few copies would trickle overseas, to appear on a handful of ...”

“... impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied ...”

“... For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For another, buyers for the big UK supermarket chains can squeeze a mega-grower like Thanet Earth as hard as any other producer. A larger query hanging over hydroponic growing in the UK is quite ...”

“... of its earliest reviewers, admitted he could not.) It wasn’t until 1714 that a copy made it to North America; by 1726 there were only three. John Winthrop, the brilliant young professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard, didn’t read the Principia until he was appointed to that chair in 1738. Half a century after its publication, only a ...”

“... or lawyerly approach to political philosophy, ticking off useful concepts and ignoring the rest. Paul Johnson (perhaps not the most reliable witness) described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship ...”

“... As he says in ‘Place and Displacement’ (1984), the work of Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Heaney himself resembles that of the young Wordsworth – loyal to Revolutionary France but attached to England – in that political and cultural dislocation in Ulster makes their experience of belonging plural. It would be mechanistic to equate ...”

“... more clarity is desirable. In his note for ‘My Cats’, May refers to Smith’s aside about the North Berwick witch trials, but doesn’t give a variant: in the printed version, the witch likes to ‘ruffle up his pride/And watch him skip and turn aside’; in performance, she watched the cat ‘spit’, not ‘skip’. You want to be reminded of Smith’s ...”