“... was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its composition. Locke’s second Treatise, it emerged, was written ...”

“... inherited a taste for drink and drama, a touch of Scottish diablerie with literary affiliations in James Hogg, and in such a novel as George Douglas’s The House with the Green Shutters. These are certainly present in the more sensational side of his work. But Twenty Thousand Streets has a quite different and much more English atmosphere, finding its models ...”

“... and educated as a doctor, his son William turns up at Guy’s Hospital playing hand to the mind of James Hinton – a surgeon in whose philosophy the Ripper’s role as ‘time’s abortionist’ is first outlined. White Chappell is preoccupied by the Ripper murders, but Sinclair is not seeking to trace out the true identity of the Ripper: a question still ...”

“... briefly before being swallowed by a moving plot.Poem-novels, or poem-stories, are all about us – James Fenton’s ‘A German Requiem’, Anne Stevenson’s ‘Correspondences’, Blake Morrison’s ‘The Inquisitor’, Motion’s ‘Independence’, the plotty, tessellated pattern of the poems in Carol Rumens’s Direct Dialling, with its East-West love ...”

“... begin his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. The American Century details J. Edgar Hoover’s personal and the FBI’s institutional linking of white supremacist and anti-Communist hysterias, to which America’s national police ...”

“... worked for Marilyn, by her housekeeper Eunice Murray, her cleaner Lena Pepit-one, by a fan called James Haspiel who used to stand outside her apartment, by one or two guys who slept with her, by any numbers of guys who wanted to sleep with her, and by a tittle-tattle lifeguard at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Her half-sister Bernice Miracle wrote a ...”

“... into certain magazines.’ (Williams had trouble finding a reliable publisher until 1937, when James Laughlin’s fledgling New Directions made him one of its central authors.) Williams could be sensitive, too, about his apparent distaste, or incapacity, for step-by-step arguments: he called himself (in the 1948 poem ‘Russia’) ‘a ...”

“... readers would do well to consider the absolute state of 1970s popular entertainment – James Bond, Benny Hill, Jimmy Savile – and what that might indicate about everyday life at the time for teenage girls: the very walls had eyes in them that followed you everywhere, making you feel, as Chris’s father made her feel, ‘sickened and queer’. In ...”

“... canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past … the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... was nothing to stop him making up for this omission in his memoir. The ‘marvellously austere’ James Conant, a former president of Harvard, one of Stern’s mentors for a brief time and high commissioner in Germany after the war, a man whose vigour and knowledge, Stern says, were matched only by Arthur Burns in the 1970s and Richard Holbrooke in the ...”

“... Ivan the Terrible had distributed land to his favourites (much to Stalin’s later approval); Peter the Great, by contrast, had abolished the private ownership of land; Catherine the Great had reintroduced it. At this point Linklater gets a little entangled in his own outline. He began with a more or less familiar Whiggish, Marxish version, in which ...”

“... the best he could get, in January 1938, was to be appointed Ambassador to the Court of St James. It was a strange appointment, especially given FDR’s inclinations towards intervention and Kennedy’s belief that appeasement was the only way to keep the peace, a view he had held long before he arrived in London. He occasionally consorted with ...”

“... I (1649), Cromwell was goaded to ever greater wickedness by the New Model Army chaplain Hugh Peter, his sidekick ‘i’the Machiavilian world’: the future Lord Protector’s outsize red toper’s nose, a staple of royalist humour, eventually takes on celestial dimensions as a comet portending Charles’s doom. Cromwell’s avowed republicanism masks ...”

“... tropics, the search for a different earthly orientation or accommodation)? Maybe Browning or Henry James – the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the life, though not one derived from the ...”