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“... of the climax, of George Eliot’s flight into wish-fulfilment in the tragic death of Maggie and Tom, the brother and sister who, like George Eliot and her unbending brother Isaac, were divided in life, but who must be seen to die in a loving embrace. George Eliot’s loss of control in the dénouement may also be related to her own precarious social ...”

“... there not to be negative about? Hutton’s work is studded with people who went clinically insane (Henry Jacob, John Leland, William Price), with claims that Homer was born near Caerphilly and that Britain was evangelised not by any Roman mission but by St Paul in person, and with amiable innocents and the fraudsters who preyed on them. Blood and Mistletoe ...”

“... Armageddon may not yet be off the agenda, but it’s heading that way. This is a world in which Henry Kissinger has joined a group preaching the surrender and destruction of all nuclear armaments, including US ones. It shouldn’t be forgotten that dread of nuclear war was the most important factor in keeping the Iron Curtain mentality going for so ...”

“... Charles Kingsley’s Hereward, the Last of the English and Hebe Weenolsen’s The Last Englishman. Henry Treece broke ranks by calling his Hereward novel Man with a Sword, but Julian Rathbone latterly re-established the pattern with his novel The Last English King. Harold and Hereward, and still in a fading sort of way Alfred the Great, are readily fitted into ...”

“... In this respect Trump is attacked for restoring the US to historical normality. As Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, puts it, under Trump the US acts ‘in the same narrowly self-interested, frequently exploitative way as many great powers throughout history’. Trump is not an ...”

“... to follow. Roe knew Coryate quite well. They had first met in England, in the courtly ambit of Henry, Prince of Wales, and Coryate had been loosely attached to the Embassy since Roe’s arrival in India two years previously. The Ambassador had an ambivalent attitude to this eccentric but deeply experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the ...”

“... themselves, or those nearest them, could be in danger, too. But who set the Germans this example? Tom Bower’s answer is unequivocal. British officials, and to a lesser extent American policies, permitted German concentration-camp gaolers, SS and Gestapo members, lawyers who had administered Nazi law, bureaucrats and industrialists who had supported Hitler ...”

“... to the barrier around the demesne. The Paisley of this period is partly modelled on the Rev. Henry Cooke, a reactionary and highly influential 19th-century preacher who did much to counter Presbyterian radicalism. This Paisley is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his ...”

“... Tom Wolfe​ lived round the corner from the Metropolitan Museum, at 21 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison. A mahogany elevator went to the sitting room of his 14th-floor apartment, much as it does to Sherman McCoy’s in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Wolfe’s ‘Master of the Universe’ – who could be Jeffrey Epstein – soon brings ignominy to his marble halls, but he never commits the basic crime of not knowing how wonderful his Upper East Side spread is ...”

“... in the early Tudor period: ‘it must have been clear to perceptive Englishmen, perhaps even to Henry [VIII], that all this [power and greatness] had gone for ever. A shrunken, post-imperial England faced an uncertain future on the margins of a Europe now dominated by the great powers.’ In what sense was England already ‘post-imperial’ by 1523, one ...”

“... lack of corroboration from any European chronicle that eventually – and much to the annoyance of Henry VII – put an end to Arthur-based claims of ancient seniority for English kings.As for the many modern attempts to make sense likewise of Nennius’s list of battles, by identifying place-names and trying to construct a plausible campaign history, Higham ...”

“... of exile. Field Day’s leading directors – Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and Tom Paulin – are literary kings over the water or over the border. Their locus is a visionary Derry awaiting Jacobite restoration.The novelist Colm Toibin said in his Sunday Independent review of the Field Day Anthology: ‘Unreconstructed Irish nationalists ...”

“... should be called African. Mark Twain himself maintained that Huck Finn was based on a lad called Tom Blankenship, a poor-white outcast son of the town drunk of Hannibal. This opens up various possibilities. Perhaps Tom talked like Jimmy, or, indeed, Jimmy talked like Tom – we can never ...”

“... and less than half of that was kept in the revised version, which runs for an hour and a half. As Tom Charity remarks in his critical biography of Cassavetes, ‘Mekas’s “spontaneous cinema” had no sooner been recognised than it was reconsidered.’ For Faces, which runs a little over two hours, Cassavetes shot around 150 hours of film. That’s an ...”