“... We are practically wiped out but we charged and took the Hun trenches yesterday. I stopped a Jack Johnson with my head, and my skull is slightly cracked. But I’m getting on splendidly. I did awfully well. Grenfell died slowly enough from the shell-splinter for his family to rush over and attend. His mother read him poems and Euripides’s Hippolytus, of ...”

“... in the decades before the Civil War, a large number of whom were sent from older states such as Virginia to the burgeoning Cotton Kingdom of the Lower South. Every Southern newspaper carried advertisements for the sale of slaves and every major town had slave dealers who drew attention to their business with signs proclaiming ‘Negro Sales’ or ‘Negroes ...”

“... Kierkegaard wrote, ‘we suggest that it is simultaneously forgotten yet preserved.’ Samuel Johnson said that ‘forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance,’ and Johnny Cash sang, ‘I forgot to remember to forget.’ That forgetting is a way of remembrance is the idea which recurs throughout Heller-Roazen’s book, appearing again and again in ever ...”

“... from the American Dream of the white, periwigged, slaveholding intelligentsia of Enlightenment Virginia. Nevertheless, greater democratisation came in the 1830s during the age of Jackson; a tragic and bloody Civil War had to be fought in the 1860s to end the peculiar institution of Southern race slavery; democracy was extended to women voters in 1920; and ...”

“... he’s still bulletproof in Texas). The Gunter – another cattle king hotel – is where Robert Johnson made his first recordings, in 1936, and rock and roll was born. Eisenhower had an office in town, and he was in it on the morning he heard about Pearl Harbor. I don’t even think he was a general then. The San Antonio gangster Freddie Carrasco, while in ...”

“... Fundamentally he sees life, in terms of his famous definition to Lady Ossory, as a comedy: like Johnson, he disliked a feeler. Throughout, Newcastle is described in terms of farce and buffoonery. The ‘burlesque Duke of Newcastle’ of the letters is fleshed out into a coherent and intelligible character: ‘He loved business immoderately, yet was only ...”

“... by Theodore Dreiser while a cheap ‘just for study’ copy will be hawked by a professor from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. My treasured copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy has a preface by F.D. & P.J.-S. and an introduction whose Part I is by P.J.-S. and whose Part II, briefer, is by F.D., which suggests these initials know the ...”

“... to get people to believe that their personal details won’t be handed on to the authorities. When Johnson Jones Hooper wrote about his experience of ‘Taking the Census in Alabama’, he signed it ‘by a “Chicken-Man” of 1840’ – a reference to the common belief that his job was to identify (for tax purposes) every chicken, cow and loom. A hundred ...”

“... in the cause. An article Prager read in the New Yorker referred to the plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia, which overturned bans on interracial marriage, as the beau idéal. The Lovings had said all the right things, then stayed out of the limelight – and stayed married. They even had the perfect name. The few sentences on the more ...”

“... I never quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives them the opportunity to have fun at the expense of Farage and Co. And so they do. But the impression an audience comes away with is that actually nothing much matters and that ...”

“... The scale of what the abolitionists were up against is only now becoming clear. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, opposition to anti-slavery may turn out to be more interesting than anti-slavery itself.The voyage of the Recovery provides Nicholas Rogers with his subject in Murder on the Middle Passage. The torture and murder of the unnamed girl off the coast ...”

“... or lodge in the same hotel. The 1949 meeting was held at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Woodward arranged for John Hope Franklin, a Black historian who had just published From Slavery to Freedom, a pioneering survey of African American history, to deliver a paper. But where would Franklin sleep and eat? Woodward facetiously suggested that ...”

“... John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived in New York after an extended stay in ...”

“... individuals who just happened to be ‘walking through the building’, as the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, put it. Trump recently referred to the riot and the prosecution against him as the ‘6 January Hoax’ and to the arrested rioters as ‘hostages’. His vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance, has described the defendants as ‘political ...”

“... was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent advocates for Black rights in the Reconstruction era, and was elected to Congress in 1890. By 1901, however, when Hughes was born, the spread of Jim Crow laws had eroded ...”