“... of Thame. This Folio Society reissue comes in the expected fine binding and with illustrations by Peter Bailey, but without any notes to identify all the one-time celebrities, half-celebrities or ‘significant people’, as Fothergill rates them, who throng the road to Thame. Many famous names are dropped, sometimes no more than dropped. Literature and art ...”

“... production as a canon unto itself. No other American writers except Gertrude Stein and Henry James have managed this successfully, and I suspect it’s a further source of irritation to those who find Burroughs irritating anyway. He was a rare example – Faulkner was another – of a writer who can write while intoxicated and he wrote nearly everything ...”

“... and a contemporary woodcut from Germany labelled ‘the two great impostors’ shows him facing James Nayler, the messianic English Quaker. Nayler had entered Bristol like Jesus entering Jerusalem, on the back of an ass. His followers walked behind him and a sign proclaimed him King of the Jews. His movement had effects right across Europe, the Middle East ...”

“... American oil companies since that’s ‘what gets the marines coming in’. Meanwhile, Calil knew Peter Mandelson – Mandelson had rented a flat from him – and questions were asked in the House of Commons as to whether ministers or officials had discussed the matter with Mandelson (Mandelson denied it). At any rate, British intelligence soon knew about the ...”

“... Queen’s Gallery’s absorbing historical survey of the reign of the second Charles (and that of James II, his brother and successor, no better a politician than their father) opens with the 1649 post-execution proclamation, which still has the power to challenge us: ‘The office of a king is unnecessary, burthensom and dangerous to the liberty, safety and ...”

“... the limitations of pure abstraction. A third text, The Perception of the Visual World (1950) by James J. Gibson, ‘a study of how motion affects a viewer in a three-dimensional space’, also played an important role in his art-making (Duchamp was interested in such questions too). During this period Hamilton spent many hours on the train from London to ...”

“... Sayers tried the same trick in The Documents in the Case, her only crime novel not featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, but it was her least successful book: too many competing voices drowned out the plot. (Van Dine’s 16th rule: ‘A detective novel should contain … no literary dallying with side-issues … They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant ...”

“... as alien. The literary case Heller-Roazen privileges above all others is Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, the plebeian Faust who sold his shadow to the devil for magical gifts quickly squandered and so lost his ‘human belonging’, as Thomas Mann put it. Here the Latin adage nomen omen has an ironic twist, for Chamisso thought Schlemihl meant ...”

“... and ships raised by the government of India occupied the Persian port of Bushehr at great expense. James Outram, who lends his name to many neighbourhoods in India, led the British forces. He returned to India to quell the uprising known as the Indian Mutiny – or, depending on your choice of historian, the First Indian War of Independence. As Indian rebels ...”

“... culture: folk songs, riddles, Anansi stories and especially the Psalms and Proverbs of the King James Bible. Johnson recalls these biblical cadences blending into the rhythms of everyday speech, and later into the language of reggae and dub poetry.In November 1963, Johnson went to join his mother, who had emigrated to England to work as a nurse. London, he ...”

“... picture; in some ways it reinforces it. Thompson’s second target is more consequential. It was Peter Laslett, adopting the techniques of the French historical demographers to the records of obscure English villages of the 17th century, who in 1963 first established what seemed to be the surprising modernity of English village life, at least with respect to ...”

“... and then been killed in Spain alongside John Cornford and Julian Bell. Jeremy fell immediately for James Dean on seeing East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause. A few years later he was even more passionately drawn to the Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski, who like Jeremy wore dark glasses and walked around beneath a dazzling cloud of weltschmerz. Like many of his ...”

“... by the former prime minister nor by his publishers’. After​ the brief and futile interlude of James Callaghan’s premiership, a new Tory prime minister entered Downing Street in May 1979. Almost thirty years before, at the 1950 general election, a 24-year-old research chemist by the name of Margaret Roberts had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. By now ...”

“... on the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, carried out in the interests of BP. In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times explained: When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Muhammad Mossadegh as Iran’s prime minister in 1953, ensuring another 25 years of rule for Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the CIA was already figuring that its ...”

“... view of Shakespeare’s national allegiance was eloquently summed up by another Philadelphian, Peter Markoe, in 1786: Monopolising Britain! Boast no more His genius to your narrow bounds confin’d; Shakespeare’s bold spirit seeks our western shore, A gen’ral blessing for the world design’d, And, emulous to form the rising age, The noblest Bard ...”