“... was the inevitability of a clash between Jewish and Arab nationalism. Since Balfour and Lloyd George had had intimate experience of the clash of nationalisms and religions in Ireland, that was a pretty remarkable fit of absent-mindedness, particularly as they were warned by Curzon of the likely consequences of imposing heavy Jewish immigration on a ...”

“... entirely on paper.’ One such was for a terrace at Norwood in the 1850s, which is included in Baker and Hyde’s attractive anthology of London’s freaks, follies and fantasies from the 17th century to the present day. Of the many discarded designs and rejected plans, everyone will have their favourite. For grandeur, there is Wren’s abortive ‘Great ...”

“... on witchcraft, she would have discovered that over fifteen years ago the American anthropologist George Foster coined the useful expression ‘limited good’ for just such a situation. Here a fixed store of goods, with no opportunity for expanding resources, with in Favret-Saada’s terms ‘no room for two’, creates competitive conditions conducive to ...”

“... naked man crouching at the bottom of the Bayeux Tapestry, his genitalia on full display. (In 2018, George Garnett achieved brief internet fame by counting the 93 phalluses, human and equine, shown on the tapestry, and documenting their states of tumescence.) Medieval manuscript pages often have a stately central text surrounded by rollicking activity. Nuns ...”

“... for state planning in The Social Function of Science. In response the Oxford geneticist John Baker set up a Society for Freedom in Science, with a passionate attack on any attempt to tell scientists what they should work on or the methods they should use. The conflict between Bernalian and Bakerian views of science runs throughout Freedom’s ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... out of practice in company. His wife, Hester, had long since been turfed out and their only son, George, was away and for the moment estranged, too. But this was Sassoon’s normal way of talking (his poetry readings at the height of his fame had often been more or less inaudible), and it was no obstacle to a formidable eloquence when he got going. He talked ...”

“... the garage. Scholars have long known that the leading women in Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, were based on Fitzgerald’s early girlfriend, Ginevra King, and her classmate at the Westover School in Connecticut, Edith Cummings, a noted golfer. The men in the story are not so easy to pin down, beginning with Nick Carraway, the narrator. Carraway ...”

“... is a professor of theological ethics at Duke. Also cited as symptomatic of the times was Houston Baker’s cryptic remark that choosing between authors like Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck ‘is like choosing between a hoagy and a pizza. I am one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards.’ ...”

“... germane to their investigation and must be exhaustively scrutinised before being ruled out. George Eliot talked about the human need to filter, lest madness ensue: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the ...”

“... Carter, 25, hanged himself two days after returning to Rikers from a state psychiatric hospital. George Pagan, 48, was plainly ill during the nine days he spent on the island, eating little and urinating, defecating and vomiting on himself. He died of sepsis, after staff failed to take him to any of his nine scheduled medical appointments. Emanuel ...”

“... alternative to work, was quickly eradicated. And there was a new iteration under David Cameron and George Osborne, in the form of austerity. The hypothesis of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’, touted by Osbornites during the first years of the coalition government, is that cuts to public spending can lead to economic growth, by creating more opportunities ...”

“... in the Resistance, and had a career as a right-wing politician after the war. The other book was George Millar’s Maquis. Millar, a brave and very talented Scottish journalist, was recruited by the SOE and parachuted into the Franche-Comté, just after the sorely wounded Harry Reé left it.For a teenager on this side of the Channel, these books suggested an ...”

“... High School, The Art School, The Hardware Store, The Beach, The Dock, The Shore, The Fiddler, The Baker, The Baker’s Wife, The Bartender, The Landlady, The Bus Driver, Mother, Father, Sister. The capitalisations confer a generality, as though we could be anywhere and with anyone. Perhaps a similar instinct leads Fosse to ...”

“... strongly critical of some of his appointments, especially of ‘internationalists’ such as George H.W. Bush, James Baker and Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger was one of the few figures in the administration to show concern about white extremism. Reagan only made matters worse by allying himself with Jewish ...”