“... this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a moustache, let us ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... between Scottish identity and the left isn’t new. In 1924, the Independent Labour Party MP James Maxton spoke of turning ‘the English-ridden, capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... everyday life for everybody else. This can come as a shock to even the best-informed citizens. James Carville, the Svengali behind Clinton’s election win in 1992, was so amazed by the power of freely moving capital, viewed at close range, he said that if reincarnation were real, he would like to be born again as the international bond markets. But the ...”

“... knowledge’ to work for counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Peter Mandler wants to rescue Mead. His book portrays her as one of the more sympathetic US internationalists. First, she got Americans interested in the far corners of the globe in the early 1940s when, in Mandler’s view, many were inclined to turn their ...”

“... A mineral, Childrenite, was named after him, as were a species of cowrie shell and a python. (John James Audubon, who befriended Children on a trip to London, tried to name an American warbler after him, before finding that it was only the baby of a bird he’d already identified.) In 1838 Talbot sent Children some of his drawings of crystals; he sent him ...”

“... Act making it a crime to publish false criticism of the Government or its leaders – and that James Madison, the principal author of the First Amendment, had condemned the Act. It was a violation, he said, not only of the freedom of speech and press but of the whole premise of our new Constitution: that the people were to make the ultimate political ...”

“... by association. Both biographies share an aversion to the twice-told tale (by Ernest Jones and Peter Gay) of an Enlightenment Freud dutiful and dauntless in the stables of irrationality. The new biographers have turned away from prelapsarian universals. Rather than insulate his thought from its darker strains, they side emphatically with his fallibilistic ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule ...”

“... Countdown Calendar (published in Tower Hamlets, printed in Hong Kong) with illustrations by Peter Kent. Kent has adopted all the standard tricks – colour enhancement, elimination of the funnel that carries away the exhaust fumes from the Blackwall Tunnel, weird perspectives promoting the status of the peninsula – but he can’t do much to put a ...”