“... Nowhere are these contradictions and incoherences more visisbly acted out than in the career of Richard Nixon. It was Wills’s great achievement to show this in his one first-rate book – Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970). That Nixon was, had to be, an aberration came to be an article of faith for almost everyone. What Wills showed ...”

“... book his study most brings to mind, in the end, is not another anthropological work but Clockers, Richard Price’s best-selling novel about the Jersey City crack trade. In many ways, indeed, In Search of Respect out-does Clockers. Bourgois did not merely report on East Harlem, after all; he lived there with his wife and child for four years, researching the ...”

“... exacerbated the hardship. There were tense confrontations with the Dutch traders and the other English settlements further down the Connecticut Valley; and, although Pynchon claimed to believe in treating them as equals, there was open conflict with the Native Americans. Gaskill remarks that most colonists believed the natives to be, at least ...”

“... their carrot and stick ways by the Wellesley brothers (Arthur, the future duke of Wellington, and Richard). They took Low under their wing. His career as company handyman had begun. Men like Low were crucial to company rule in India. When he arrived in Jaipur in 1825 on his first big posting, the company’s resources were at full stretch. Two ...”

“... once said, ‘the soul of fact’. Beryl Bainbridge was one of the last of the pre-Google English novelists, the last, you might say, following Coleridge, for whom facts had a soul and were not simply pluckable. Take her novel Master Georgie, set in the Crimean War. While reading it, I decided to do a little background research. It was super-easy to ...”

“... Italy. Rowse’s enthusiasms do not cut much ice with Barbara Howard Traister, a professor of English tempted by the New Historicism. She has tried to embrace the whole corpus of Forman’s writings, and says that his manuscripts are more her subject than he is; she wants to pursue through them, not the ‘eccentric and exotic’, by which she feels that ...”

“... Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des Abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The ...”

“... Poel in the 1890s, emerged as part of an Arts and Crafts yearning for a pre-industrial, hyper-English England. The earliest attempt to build a conjectural replica of the Globe – a half-size version by Edwin Lutyens – formed part of the nostalgic Shakespeare’s England exhibition mounted at Earl’s Court in 1912.In the US such fairground ...”

“... have come to light (again) in Montreal: a small team from the Toronto-based Records of Early English Drama project even produce an elaborate and implausible hypothesis in defence of the suspect cloth label on the back. The wish that was father to that thought is made helpfully explicit by the artistic director of the Stratford Festival in Ontario, ...”

“... has been the dark period of the Church of England: the middle ground lost between books on the English Revolution and the Elizabethan Church on the one side, and studies of religion in the English Revolution on the other. Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne are subjects: literature has seen to that. And so is ...”

“... France displayed a more radical profile than Tory England, and a polity more attractive to the English liberal Whig than Catholic, Inquisitorial Spain and Portugal. Decidedly a liberal Whig, Byron abstains pointedly from cheering on the war effort. He denounces our Portuguese allies as cowardly and murderous, and sees the Spanish resistance as compromised ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... were young and anything but discreet, sober or, for the most part, fluent in languages other than English. Many came from America’s upper echelons: Mellon, Vanderbilt, du Pont, Morgan and other robber baron families. Some, to the dismay of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, were trade unionists, socialists, Jews and veterans of the Lincoln Brigade. When Hoover ...”

“... was to find out why, in an era of melting ice, rising seas and swollen rivers, this low-lying English district, a reclaimed wetland with barely a free plot above the high-water mark on a spring tide, was still building out. Surely the barrier had been built to protect lives and existing property unluckily stranded in a climate change danger zone, not to ...”

“... parts of Henry VI, which we are now invited to refer to as The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York – 1 Henry VI comes later, after Titus Andronicus. The two parts of Henry IV are similarly split by The Merry Wives, which shows how fiercely attentive to chronology we are required to be. For simplicity’s sake, the following remarks on ...”