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“... prepared actively for months past for an armed struggle and were fired up for action. Revere and William Dawes, a Boston tanner, were originally sent to warn two of the Revolutionary leaders, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were staying at a parsonage in Lexington, that a British force was on its way to arrest them. Both Revere and Dawes successfully ...”

“... as much to social as he does to cricket history; but that hasn’t always been seen. C.L.R. James, the one marxisant historian of cricket there has been, was shocked to find no mention of him in G.M. Trevelyan’s then canonical English Social History, or in the work of such socialist historians as G.D.H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, even though they were ...”

“... of meaning and reference. ‘At least one reader’ turns out, fifty pages later, to have been William Empson. Brown refers, with irrefutable accuracy, to ‘an American woman actress’, ‘Infidelity’ seems to have some occult meaning for him, because he alludes, in a passage about ‘The Dead’, to Gabriel’s ‘fascination with his wife’s ...”

“... would continue in use as a means of evading surrender terms and countering the effects of defeat. James Bamford’s valiant attempt to expose the secrets of the American National Security Agency could well have been subtitled ‘Beyond Ultra’ because he traces the vast expansion that has taken place in espionage and surveillance since Britain divulged the ...”

“... is no smell of passion in the air. Then there are his male mentors, friends and acquaintances: William Ellery Channing; Sampson Reed (one of whose books Emerson considered the best thing since Plato in Plato’s line); Bronson Alcott (whom Emerson admired as a great prophet, and whose work is quite unreadable today); the ‘manifestly insane’ Jones Very ...”

“... the publication of the first of the eight volumes of her History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line in 1763 still remains largely unknown, as does the way she endured the social and intellectual obscurity that lasted from her controversial second marriage in 1778 to her death in a small Berkshire village in 1791. She had ...”

“... Lighthouse by the great civil engineer John Smeaton; and the development of the steam engine by James Watt. There were also the achievements of James Cook, the son of a Yorkshire labourer, who, after surveying Newfoundland between 1763 and 1767, made three voyages to the Pacific, charting the coasts of New Zealand, the ...”

“... who appears to have initiated their passionate and riskily public relationship. Her father, William Pember Reeves, a leading Fabian and the recently appointed director of the London School of Economics, was incensed that his daughter had, as he saw it, fallen into the clutches of a philandering seducer more than twice her age, who was, to boot, a fellow ...”

“... the bread of daily experience into the host of sacred nourishment which he calls art. Flaubert and James, Proust and Joyce are adepts who immolate themselves on the altar of their own art, gathering profane experience into the artifice of eternity. For Leavis, the most precious novel is one which reflects a ‘reverent openness before Life’, and the ...”

“... the law. A second view, developed and prolifically publicised by a barrister journalist named William Finlason in the aftermath of the rising, was that martial law replaced all civil authority with the will of the military commander – subject only to what Finlason delphically called ‘natural justice’ or, as Disraeli later put it in the ...”

“... his material.Produced under Fascism in 1943, Visconti’s Ossessione (an unauthorised version of James M. Cain’s hardboiled novel The Postman Always Rings Twice) is generally considered the first Neorealist film, but it was Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), the first movie made after the war to represent the recent Italian past, that planted the ...”

“... its demolition in 1941 was a disgrace.Augusta Persse was born in 1852, and in 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, who was 35 years older than her. He died in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area ...”

“... biographical writing about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later ...”

“... what happens next. This episode is very funny in its grossness, a sort of realist version of William Burroughs’s talking arsehole routine. But it is also, like the talking arsehole routine, much more than merely funny. As I have said already, one of the most exciting things about Welsh’s book is the way it draws you right inside a community of people ...”

“... A hundred and fifty years ago William Thackeray observed – after a trawl through London bookstalls – that middle-class litterateurs like himself knew (and cared) less about working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase ‘the Unknown Public ...”