“... are fetched by Gershom, Washington’s Jewish-African slave. ‘Gershom is presently telling King-Joaks – “Actually, they’re Slave-and-Master Joaks, re-tailored for these Audiences. King says to his Fool ...” ’I started looking in my wonderful Brewer’s Dictionary. I discovered, among many other things, that ...”

“... puts it, ‘a highly visible expert on tyranny, liberty and slavery.’ In the Wheatley home on King Street, she had a front-row view of protests against the Stamp Act, whose repeal she celebrated in a poem. While her early works declare loyalty to the paternal King George, she later used parent-child metaphors to depict ...”

“... in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing outsider, master subordinate, male ...”

“... was announced, Tesla’s stock dropped 12 per cent: investors didn’t like that their ‘techno-king’ (Musk’s official title on paperwork filed with the SEC) was going to be distracted by another company. It dropped even further when it emerged that Musk was proposing to pay for Twitter, in part, by selling a chunk of his Tesla shares. The more the ...”

“... self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former puerile fantasies./No, we’ve never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great.’ In one of its most lyrical passages, the poem becomes a hymn tothose who could harness neither steam nor electricitythose who explored neither the ...”

“... in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring Redditch had to divert emergency patients elsewhere at least 65 times. At Derriford ...”

“... her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. ‘Maude Hutchins,’ James Kelly wrote in 1955, does ‘as she pleases’ as a novelist and ‘to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all ...”

“... age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created equal’ – but, as James Shapiro recently showed in Shakespeare in a Divided America, he also thought that Desdemona’s ‘fondling with Othello is disgusting’ and her passion for him ‘unnatural solely and exclusively because of his colour’. It would be convenient if such ...”

“... on typography, publishers on publishing, lawyers on the law, copyright experts on copyright, Sir James Pitman on shorthand, Winston Churchill on political history, Edward Elgar on music, Gabriel Pascal on film direction, John Reith on the BBC, and especially actors on acting (he was fond of them much in the way one is fond of children: they needed discipline ...”

“... proved itself worthy of fiction. It was, before Sallis began his project, one of the foci for James Lee Burke’s Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux. Sallis had a proper respect for Burke’s achievements: his sense of place, his pacing, his ease of discourse. Burke was very good on food, on the Gulf, the tension in the transit between easy-living in the ...”

“... that ‘there is some connection between Burns’s “Vision” and the vision of Boethius.’ James Kinsley’s encyclopedic Oxford edition of the poems and songs has traced this connection, in its assessment of sources for the work. The supernatural devices of Pope’s Rape of the Lock are employed; the division of the poem into sections called Duans ...”

“... Come-On’ and ‘Remembering Lunch’. ‘The Come-On’ takes its epigraph from Camus: ‘The king’s son who kept watch over the gates of the garden in which I wanted to live’. It does not take the class war quite seriously, and that makes it the more effectively disconcerting. Can I become the king’s son? But ...”

“... two incongruous neighbours: A.E. Housman, anchored by misanthropy to this out-of-the-way spot, and James Klugmann, the chief Communist student organiser, and later a life-long Party worker. I.2 was not an ideal residence. When a gust of wind blew, the small fire, over which toast could be made with the help of a long fork and much patience, threw out billowing ...”

“... produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of ...”