“... curtain on the emissaries of the leading nations to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Britain’s Lord Castlereagh, the future suicide, was remembered at home by Lady Morgan for ‘his cloudless smile ... his untunable voice and passion for singing all the songs in The Beggar’s Opera’. In Vienna he behaved like the Ulster Protestant he was, staying in ...”

“... from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin and the Book of Genesis). Yet the questions remain, are even stimulated by ...”

“... its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll and remained heavily indebted to Little Richard. Bouncing around with Jenkins, who ...”

“... us. By an accident of the publishing season, Tennant’s morsel of national whimsy coincides with James Michener’s brick-sized The Covenant. At 873 pages (costing a mere £7.95 – compare Alice fell’s 124 for £5.50), this can claim to be the only Great American South African novel. Michener’s work belongs to the currently best-selling genre of the ...”

“... memories of being taken to a dancehall, sleepily watching the adults ‘wining and shimmying/to Lord Kitchener’; ‘that night we wanted to fly in our aunts’ skin,/we so loved their talk, the sugar in their mouths.’ These scenes of pleasure are part of a process of recovery. But they also mark the distance from home. Although Brand’s speaker ...”

“... a Second Class, was surely employable? Matthew was bailed out by his father’s Whig connections: Lord Lansdowne took him on as private secretary with minimal responsibilities. He pulled in some £288 a year and an additional £480 from an Oriel fellowship (Oriel had not yet tied its fellowships to Schools, and Oriel was Dr Arnold’s old college) – not bad ...”

“... and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no whole of it ... Rather, it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is one to speak?’ Which, indeed? One matter which ...”

“... papers’ were transcribed for the prompt book, licensed by the Master of the Revels as the Lord Chamberlain’s deputy, annotated by the prompter, and divided into actors’ parts. Publication, whether in authorised or unauthorised editions, or in the Folio collection of 1623, involved further interference, sometimes by scribes and always by ...”

“... understaffed, the Bari base – under the command, as it happens, of another Communist, Major James Klugman – had to decode and re-encode all traffic between Frank and Cairo in both directions. The matter of the code-books was at last sorted out, just before Frank and Sergeant Scott crossed the frontier into Bulgaria, when they were immediately involved ...”

“... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent ...”

“... instead to a new ideal – one that would consume his fortune and destroy his reputation. James Clerk Maxwell’s four field equations, published in 1865, had unified electricity, magnetism and optics, and predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves moving through space at the speed of light. In 1886-87 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz ...”

“... it, equip us to make a rational judgment. We may, for instance, conclude that the description of James Wait’s death in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is verbally so close to the death scene of Forestier in Maupassant’s Bel Ami that the latter must have influenced the former; and if others agree, then something definite (and not uninteresting) has been ...”

“... 1940s – may begin by telling you the names of ‘the great English novelists’ (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad), but the opening chapter then takes us through the failings of those who came before them. Defoe ‘matters little as an influence’. Fielding existed to make Austen possible, but if you feel her ‘distinction’ you will also feel that ‘life ...”

“... a large number of people, with or without the inspiration and example of Sir Oswald Mosley and Lord Rothermere, are both zealous Fascists and devout Christians.’ But in 1934 ‘the inspiration and example’ of Mosley would have been words drily to call up rot dry and wet. The caddish effrontery of Mosley’s private life (Eliot made the relevance of ...”

“... of the historian for the showier trappings of the historical novelist. In his capacity as Lord Thomas of the Centre for Policy Studies, he has indeed made public his desire for a new, self-confident mode of national historiography, and the question arises inevitably: is this an earnest of his intentions? The first chapter, entitled ‘The City of ...”