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“... in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as their ...”

“... moments in the history of American airtime. Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore ...”

“... Abbey’ as a ‘post-revolutionary’ work. Roe argues the poem is haunted by the spirit of John Thelwall, the radical orator who was extremely popular in the 1790s and to whom Roe’s book is dedicated. In 1798 Thelwall was living a few miles away from Tintern Abbey, having retired from political engagement after the wave of arrests which followed the ...”

“... Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and tentative poetry collection, Letter from Tokyo; and John Hersey’s great work of reportage, Hiroshima. When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous. At the peak of his Manhattan success, Jay McInerney came out to study karate and produced the dismal Ransom, full of ...”

“... farmers to slaughter them once stocks of hay ran out. In Alpine regions clergymen prayed at the foot of glaciers, the spread of which into the valleys, tax records show, wiped out whole communities. Hungry peasants ate weeds and ground nutshells to eke out barley flour and oats. Many died from hypothermia. Witches, who were associated with weather magic ...”

“... might actually have come to something. The dead titles and the posthumous publications – dreary, foot-slogging reads and ever-diminishing rehashes of Under the Volcano, novelising the novelist who wrote it, ‘six authors in search of a character’, he said – are articles of faith. Clarence Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 to a Liverpool cottonbroker, the ...”

“... Joseph Hotung Gallery is new only in name: it is the familiar Edward VII Gallery, designed by Sir John Burnet and opened by George V in 1914. It is a high-ceilinged room 360 feet in length, running along the north side of the first floor of the BM. Tall windows give onto sky and plane trees, with Montague Place and Senate House providing a sober ...”

“... Nancy met and married Waldorf Astor, who owned the Observer and was MP for Plymouth; his brother John owned the Times. The Astors were so rich that occasionally it embarrassed her: ‘My dear what do you think Mr Astor’ – her father-in-law William, later the first Lord Astor – ‘has done,’ she wrote to Phyllis. ‘Don’t breathe it even to Reggie ...”

“... difficulty of keeping one’s hat in place while performing the nine prostrations of the kowtow. John Bell, a Scottish doctor attached to a Russian embassy c.1720, didn’t enjoy the way sheep were cooked, but was fascinated by the acrobats and jugglers. He reckoned that Russia was the only nation with a fair chance of conquering China, though there ...”

“... years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds ...”

“... no 17th-century vernacular poet of this name is now recorded.’ But this is of course John Ogilby, the dancing-master turned voluminous poet, whom Pope repeatedly gives us licence to call ‘great’ (‘Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great’ and ‘thy great fore-father, Ogilby’ in the Dunciad; Ogilby also ornaments MacFlecknoe). This ...”

“... Cathy leaves home to live in a squat, and Sheila manages through spirited perseverance to get her foot back in the door of Walton Lane. But the action of Present Times seems to be there less for itself than for the opportunity it provides for dialogue, and the book does not develop organically but through a string of set-piece arguments, mutual animadversions ...”

“... husband’s poems. In such cases writing does in a sense become a ‘genuinely social activity’. John Clare’s dealings with his publisher Taylor provide a variation on this theme. Clare’s peculiar circumstances resulted in revisions that were necessarily ‘social’, but modern editors have a persistent tendency to revert to the earliest unsocial ...”

“... Voorhees’s study is different. He highlights the all-important fact that in October 1962 John F. Kennedy was about to face congressional midterm elections. The results would determine the fate of his presidency, as well as his prospects for re-election in 1964. Kennedy’s New Frontier domestic agenda – which promised a huge house-building ...”

“... that had won the referendum by recasting the choice as one between the people’s will and a foot-dragging establishment, and hired Dominic Cummings, the architect of that strategy, to win a general election for him. He promised not only to get Brexit done, but to ‘level up’ the country in order to reward the constituencies that had voted for it, and ...”