“... opinion of it, or those who followed that other great moral setpiece of American politics, the Thomas-Hill hearings, will be disappointed to find no gender echoes in these books. In their endeavour to recast the American culture wars the two English professors keep their distance from die issues of sexual and racial power and focus instead on the safer ...”

“... literary opinions are just as forcefully expressed. There is a long list of enthusiasms: for William Howells and Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like ...”

“... the outbreak of the Revolution at Lexington and Concord. The British commander-in chief, General Thomas Gage, gets as much attention as Paul Revere. There have been many versions of the battles at Lexington and Concord, but all of them have been superseded by Fischer, who has made it unnecessary to produce another one. Among other things, he has cleansed the ...”

“... distinctive Gladys Peto; Robert Lawson is here but not Lawson Wood; A.E. Bestall (briefly) but not Thomas Henry. In compiling the book – which is, in fact, very nearly comprehensive – the authors have drawn on the holdings of the Victoria and Albert Museum, in particular the Guy Little Collection in the National Art Library and the Renier Collection at ...”

“... in art and stultifying Victorian versifying. Some of this vast body of poetry was superb (William Carlos Williams), most of it mediocre and some of it dreadful. Burke’s verse hovers around the middle of the spectrum, the best of it plain-spoken and terse in the American idiom which Williams was perfecting, the worst allusive in the manner of ...”

“... Sir Patrick Heron Watson was almost his contemporary in the Edinburgh Medical School; and that Sir Thomas Watson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society some ten years before William Budd, Conan Doyle’s partner in general practice as a young man. A Sherlock became Dean of St Paul’s near the close of the 17th ...”

“... man: as respected and influential as his own early schoolmaster in Dorset, the dialect poet William Barnes. These professional distinctions had no more to do with his service to the Elephant Man than did his lifelong devotion to literature (he once wrote a book on Browning’s The Ring and the Book, illustrated with 100 photographs he had taken at the ...”

“... confessedly executed with tongue in cheek. It has some two hundred and fifty illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson at his liveliest, ranging from the satirical to the rustic. The text is by Robert Southey, condensed from his 1807 report on England purporting to be by a Spanish nobleman, and the joke consists of finding Southey phrases to fit Rowlandson ...”

“... from George Pearson, who verified the efficacy of vaccination from his own collaborative work with William Woodville at the Smallpox Hospital in London. Woodville went on to describe over five hundred individuals who had received vaccination, and his work lent credibility to Jenner’s preliminary observations. Although the initial discovery of vaccination was ...”

“... The Rodney King four would be tried by their peers – that much was certain. The Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial had introduced cable subscribers to something called the ‘Court Channel’. This service gives non-stop live coverage to high-profile trials. Cameras were allowed into ...”

“... with. There were times when I’m sure we could’ve led each other into just about anything. Just William-type adventures – earning pocket-money or looking for fun – would more often than not end in nastiness or threats to each other or danger to other people, especially to girls our own age and younger boys. There was badness in it, a form of delinquency ...”

“... long, elegant fingers that were always flying upward) to hide a beautiful gap-toothed smile. (Thomas Victor’s photograph, reproduced on the dust-jacket of the Collected, catches the smile convincingly.) Salter also fills in, for Clampitt’s new readers, the moral background to the poems. It was Quakers who had settled New Providence, but a more ...”

“... construction. We are told that the Union failed to work because the then prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, did not create a ‘United Kingdom identity’ following the 1801 Act, and a policy of ‘inertia’ towards Ireland soon prevailed. The best attempts at incorporative policies, according to Townshend, were Catholic Emancipation in ...”

“... Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody ...”

“... Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style ...”