“... Harbor, and starred Jack Benny, Betty Grable, Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, who tap-danced on Hitler’s coffin. Hecht also wrote propagandist radio plays and, in 1943, another pageant. We Will Never Die was dedicated to the ‘two million Jewish dead of Europe’ and told the story of the Jewish people from antiquity to the ...”

“... him from his popular reputation of Slippery Sam, ‘Old Peepy’, a mixture of Charles Pooler and Paul Pry, a natural target for clerihews (‘Sam Pepys, Gives one the crepys’) and the wags of 1066 and All That. If the diary had been seized and burned by the hangman his reputation need never have suffered, though he might well have been seriously ...”

“... iron to make nails.) Even the armour they wore was made from shiny paper. (In the second part of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe had ridiculed China’s trade, pitiful in comparison with ‘the universal commerce’ of Europe, and its pathetic army, furnished with erratic firearms and powder lacking in strength. What particularly annoyed Defoe in his fiction was ...”

“... by hydraulic rams to block the flow of water and seal off the gap in the town’s defences. Adam Robinson, the Environment Agency engineer responsible for building it, told me it would last for a century, and, even allowing for climate change, cut the chance of sea flooding for the 14,000 homes it protected to 0.33 per cent in any given year. Since 95 per ...”

“... priest’ Father Coughlin described the Warner brothers and their star, Edward G. Robinson, as Jews whose ‘patriotism was only as deep as their hatred of Hitler’. (According to Urwand, Goebbels was flattered to see himself depicted in the movie.) It was business as usual: the Nazis threatened to ban all American movies but did not, while ...”

“... attribution to Charlotte’s Belgian teacher, Constantin Héger, is laughable: it’s signed ‘Paul Hegér’ (Paul Emmanuel, a character with strong affinities to Héger, is the love-interest in Villette). The date given is 1850; Charlotte left Brussels in 1844. The accent is in the wrong place: Hegér not Héger. It ...”

“... church felt itself to have been visited by the Holy Spirit, and to be making fresh use of what St Paul called ‘spiritual gifts’ or ‘the manifestation of the Spirit’: speaking in tongues, dancing in the spirit, ecstatic worship, healing, miracles, prophecies. This movement had its roots in American worship. It blew through many parts of the Church of ...”

“... Dryden’s long-proposed heroic poem, an altogether opposite sense of the poet has been voiced. Paul Hammond’s John Dryden: A Literary Life (1991) asserts that Dryden could most certainly have realised his early hope to ‘make the world some part of amends for many ill plays by an heroic poem’. Hammond goes on: The writing of an heroic poem was ...”

“... of local universities through huge budget cuts. The city was horribly gerrymandered in the 2010s. Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and a native of Janesville, Wisconsin, acted as a wrecking ball on social care in the area and was a friend to people who believe that tax cuts are evidence of enlightenment. The Democrats had grown ...”

“... wilderness. I first saw him in 1973 when he opened an exhibition in Dublin by the Irish painter Paul Funge. He had all the glamour of a self-made millionaire, a caring but tough politician, a patron of the arts, but now as he moved slowly around the gallery he had a new charisma. He was dangerous, he had tried to import guns; and he was out of power, a ...”

“... dropped from the top of the Post Office Tower with her beehive as a parachute. Christine Keeler, Paul Raymond, Malcolm Allison. The Society Restaurant, The Colony Club. Crisp white linen and more bottles than the bottling-plant at Truman’s Brewery. James Booth and Victor Spinetti semaphoring idiotically in the corner of the frame, as they trawl for ...”

“... Rogers’s Judge Priest (1934); the movies that paired Shirley Temple with Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson; the post-vaudeville musical Babes in Arms (1939); Holiday Inn, which featured ‘White Christmas’ (1942); and The Jazz Singer revisions, The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949). None has attracted much scholarly attention, although all ...”

“... surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller ...”

“... change, resource depletion, the future of the planet and so on, which is more or less exactly what Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer hoped would happen when they first proposed it in the Global Change Newsletter in 2000. Crutzen is an atmospheric chemist; Stoermer, who died in 2012, was a freshwater ecologist. The nature of their work caused them to ...”

“... of fascism and the Spanish Civil War. We know he and Ruth socialised with the singer and radical Paul Robeson and his wife Eslanda, and with a brilliant former student, the Pan-Africanist and communist George Padmore. We know British intelligence kept an eye on his movements.In September, Bunche’s family went home. He went to South Africa to figure out how ...”