“... money came from the Foreign Office via the External Services of the BBC – an idea suggested by Charles Curran, the Director-General of the BBC. The External Services did indeed use Reuters material, but they paid over the odds for it and the high payments amounted to a concealed subsidy. Looking back later, Gerald Long, Reuters chief executive from 1963 to ...”

“... and there’s certainly something universal about remembering. ‘That Alice Munro, now 81,’ Charles McGrath, her first editor at the New Yorker, wrote recently in the New York Times, ‘is one of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time ought to go without saying by now.’ ‘Alice Munro,’ James Wood wrote in the LRB in 1997 ...”

“... has still not been taken on board in Britain: they engage with a post-Poundian poetic tradition (Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, George Oppen) of a kind that gives modern American poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ...”

“... in 1904 did not happen again. The most influential anti-semite in the early years of the state was Charles Bewley. He was a Quaker convert to Catholicism, a senior counsel and diplomat. In 1921 he went to Berlin as Irish Consul. Within a year he was causing trouble. In a Berlin café he insulted Robert Briscoe, who was visiting, and the Jewish owner, and was ...”

“... the Two Acts in December 1795, and in that sense – as part of an alliance which stretched from Charles James Fox through the genteel supporters of the Society for Constitutional Information to the largely shopkeeper and artisan LCS – he did perform a leading role. With a scrupulous sense of this borderline distinction, Francis Place noted down Frend as ...”

“... to everyone who called on him, from the radical Huey Long of Louisiana to the conservative Joe Robinson of Arkansas. ‘Orson, you and I are the two greatest actors in America,’ he told Orson Welles. FDR’s acting talents were very soon challenged by events. The sense of paralysis that gripped the Hoover administration during its last days had spread to ...”

“... Sambo and Miss Swartz in Vanity Fair, Camus’s Algerian victim in The Stranger, the boy who saves Robinson Crusoe but whom Crusoe sells at the first opportunity. ‘We were trained to remove or skirt our presence,’ she writes, ‘or to observe that presence as something like background.’Brand’s inquiry into ‘the literary substance of which I am made ...”

“... Advance UK, which has been endorsed by Elon Musk. What about the far-right populist Tommy Robinson? He liked ‘Tommy’ but disagreed with him on the question of identity. ‘Tommy is a civic nationalist. He believes you can become British. I think you need British ancestry to be British. A lot of people here think this,’ he added, his eyes ...”

“... loved of Ezra Pound has been said, and continues to be said, of the poets and poetries loved of Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman – two of the most important and influential of these new American writers. The anthologies edited by Silliman and Douglas Messerli contain a great deal of unpleasant and difficult poetry – for example, this passage from ...”

“... she calls ‘a social, personal and cultural history from the fall of Parnell to the realm of Mary Robinson’, does not list Micheál Mac Gréil’s books in the bibliography. Her book does not deal much with Catholicism as a system nor as a powerful monolith. It does not dwell very much on how the bishops sought to control institutions such as schools and ...”

“... recalled to Moscow, had a marked tendency to check out. (One such ‘disappeared’ member, Donald Robinson, falsely accused of contact with Trotsky in Mexico, later turned up in Hiss’s handwritten notes of the period and is the reason some on the left have always doubted Hiss’s word.) Chambers contrived to separate himself from the clandestine Communist ...”

“... Noting Jack Lindsay’s statement that Bunyan’s The Holy War, published in 1682 near the end of Charles II’s reign, is a commentary on ‘absolutism against the liberties of the people’, Greaves asserts that this view ‘cannot be sustained’, but doesn’t explain why. Yet Sharon Achinstein, a scholar he cites elsewhere, has convincingly argued that ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... it was: not only solitary reproduction but self-regeneration. Among the highest forms of life – Charles I, say, or Louis XVI – to cut in two is to kill; but to divide the LCS in two is to stimulate a process of infinite growth, ‘unbounded extension’, apparent immortality. Alongside this representation of the Society as unbounded, however, there is ...”

“... find her presiding over the counters of the smarter shops – Marshall and Snelgrove, Matthias Robinson or, in my aunties’ case, Manfield’s Shoe Shop and White’s Ladies Gowns. The Davis manner, bored, sceptical, sarcastic, was particularly effective when ‘chalking people off’, as Mam called it. It was something she never had enough ...”