“... are descending & I resume my interesting Narrative’) and the twee Caledonian jests of Sir Walter Scott (‘I do not write for such dull elves!’). Elsewhere she announces: ‘I am going to write nothing but short Sentences.’ The result – rather more uncannily – is like proto-Gertrude Stein: There shall be two full stops in every Line. Layton and ...”

“... for ‘frightening’ a white girl. Henry Patterson for asking a white woman for a drink. Henry Scott, a Pullman porter, thrown off his train and lynched for insulting a white woman. An investigation showed that she was furious because he had asked her to wait until he finished making up another white woman’s berth. Actual sexual relations, even if ...”

“... sued, or serving as a witness. The law was proposed because the Supreme Court had ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that African Americans, free or enslaved, were racially ineligible for federal citizenship, and because many states had barred African Americans and other racial minorities from enjoying even the most rudimentary civil rights. Johnson ...”

“... in his courtship of Elinor, that she had rejected him; he fled from home to the Dismal Swamp in Virginia. There exists an early (undated) posthumously-voiced sonnet called ‘Despair’, where Frost imagines himself as a suicide by drowning: I am like a dead diver after all’s Done, still held fast in the weeds’ snare below ... My sudden struggle may ...”

“... fuel economy and the safety of drinking water. Trump’s first choice as administrator of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, soon after taking command, purged its website entry on climate change. (More than a year later, if you go to epa.gov/climatechange you are told the page is still being ‘being updated’ to ‘reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of ...”

“... and Harriet Tubman. She did her research at George Washington’s plantation at Mount Vernon in Virginia, where the founding father of democracy held more than three hundred enslaved people – ‘servants’, as tour guides were still putting it in the 1970s – by the time of his death in 1799.To read Kindred now is to undergo a little of the experience ...”

“... but the Guardian isn’t one of those. It doesn’t have investors: it’s owned by a trust, the Scott Trust, forbidden by its charter from selling the organisation to a rival, floating it on the stock market or paying dividends to shareholders. The Guardian doesn’t have licence fee income like the BBC, or state funding like Al-Jazeera and Sputnik, and ...”

“... socialist’, Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for a ‘smooth-skinned sociology major’, Foucault and Virginia Woolf to keep up with an ‘ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black’. It didn’t work. ‘As a strategy for picking up girls my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless. I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste relationships.’He ...”

“... new shipyard made a loss on its first three boats and the HIDB persuaded a bigger shipbuilder, Scott Lithgow, to take over. In 1971 Howarth was told he should design an eighty-foot steel trawler to replace the earlier generation of wooden boats. He convinced an experienced Scottish skipper of this plan and the two of them worked out a design with a naval ...”

“... of the picture with his pointer, half-obscuring the image with his amusing conceits on it. In Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘Mr Forster has been apt to pervade his books like a careful hostess who is anxious to introduce, to explain, to warn her guests of a step here, of a draught there.’ From one or two remarks in his diaries, it seems Forster regretted ...”

“... dictionary and its supplements, satirically underscored by the lament of Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas that ‘it is much to be regretted that no lives of maids . . . are to be found’. In the 63 volumes published by 1901, only about 4 per cent of subjects are female, and even the most recent supplementary volume (on the first ...”

“... Sarpi through Augustine, Cicero, Vasari, Winckelmann, Flaxman, Hegel, Heine, Baudelaire, Semper, Scott, Riegl, Feyerabend, Simone Weil and Adorno, ending with Roberto Longhi. In another, from Viktor Shklovsky through Tolstoy, Marcus Aurelius and popular riddles of Roman times, Antonio de Guevara and the transmission of medieval tales to the age of Charles ...”

“... to be in the least charming, but some of her crisis sayings have the bite of the best of, say, Virginia Woolf or the early Germaine Greer. French’s thesis is that the modern cultures, at least since the invention of agriculture, are and have been engaged in a systematic war against women. Women have been repressed, abused and enslaved, and continue to be ...”

“... in Charlotte’s later letters and we hear her opinions on Thackeray, Dickens, Fielding, Scott, Austen, Gaskell, Oliphant, Mill; her theories about literature and the dangers of it; aspects of her artistic decisions:I called her ‘Lucy Snowe’ (spelt with an e) which ‘Snowe’ I afterward changed to ‘Frost.’ Subsequently – I rather ...”