“... invoking foreign political models, suggesting that he look instead to American reformers such as Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelley, Eugene Debs and A. Philip Randolph. In The Second Founding, Foner returns to this theme, stressing the exceptional and innovative nature of the Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment ordered emancipation without ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... of Dead Dogs, and a long spell of it ahead!’ he wrote, when mired in his six-volume History of Frederick the Great. Literary biography, drawing up useful morals for contemporary life, pitching an alternate universe, is no longer a legitimate vehicle. We don’t need to know. We have no wish to be instructed by the lives of the great. Biographies, ghosted ...”

“... the title Channon had longed for.)For Channon, the House of Commons was a ‘club’, a ‘brown, smelly, tawny, male paradise’, and although he and Nicolson were never significant political players, both were keen observers. Nicolson became a devotee of Churchill’s, refusing to join in the chorus of praise when Chamberlain announced that he was ...”

“... Carl Van Doren, editor of the Century, was present. So were Horace Live-right, the publisher, Frederick Allen of Harper Brothers, and Van Vechten. Paul Kellog, editor of the Survey Graphic, was ‘so impressed that night with the potential of the black literary movement’ that he decided to devote an entire issue to black literature and art the following ...”

“... publicity for the speaker or denounce his or her enemies. As the leading First Amendment scholar Frederick Schauer noted in 1992, ‘there seems to be little free inquiry about free inquiry and little free speech about free speech.’ It was a paradox that an orthodoxy of tolerance should be so intolerant of those who had less protective rather than more ...”

“... at number 1, Merrion Square. George Bernard Shaw remembered William Wilde ‘dressed in snuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) of being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and ...”

“... on the gramophone) and places I couldn’t visit (the house in St Luke’s Road with a brown plaque in memory of W.H. Hudson) because they either reminded me of her and therefore of death or of death and therefore of her. I kept on telling myself: ‘I mustn’t be rushed.’ Somehow or other, the friends had to be warned off, kept at bay. I ...”

“... became the most popular playwright of the Edwardian age. There were a few false starts, but Lady Frederick was an unexpected hit in 1907, and soon he had four plays running simultaneously in London. Most of his drawing-room comedies have been forgotten, although The Constant Wife, The Circle and For Services Rendered are said to stand up quite well. And the ...”

“... been much more attractive to me with cropped hair and in evening dress’); Wells looking ‘fat, brown and perky’; Chesterton ‘enormous, streaming with sweat, his hair dripping’; Arnold Bennett ‘very pert and looking every inch a cad’; Churchill having the appearance of ‘a drug-taker’. Perhaps there isn’t anything for me to feel guilty ...”

“... that the 1971 sequel to Rabbit, Run contains a scene of Rabbit reading The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass out loud while a black man rapes a hippy girl who, earlier, spent several pages speaking entirely in rhyme? Don’t worry: she likes it, and then dies in a fire at the end. Rabbit Redux finds Rabbit working as a printer alongside his ...”

“... entertaining in their house in Merrion Square. Shaw remembered William Wilde ‘dressed in stuffy brown; and as he had the sort of skin that never even looks clean, he produced a dramatic effect beside Lady Wilde (in full fig) if being, like Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good ...”

“... in 1950. The fact that the Stadtschloss had been the seat of the Prussian monarchs, including Frederick the Great, whose ghostly image hovers above the Führer’s on scores of propaganda posters, was ignored, as was its long association with Prussian militarism. The reconstructed imperial palace is to become the home of the Humboldt Forum, which will be ...”

“... at the confluence of the rivers Severn and Avon, into an island on the banks of a vast brown waterway resembling the Mississippi Delta. There are clues, though. In the first picture, you can see two jetties that were mangled by the torrent and haven’t been repaired. The wooden boards were sucked off and swallowed by the flood, and only the metal ...”

“... a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket square in his breast pocket, a scarf and brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the ...”