“... the Declaration of Independence were indeed theologically heterodox, including Adams, Franklin and Jefferson. There had been ferocious episodes of sectarian strife within recent memory, such as the attempt to create a colonial bishop in 1767-70, or the vocal reaction to the Quebec Act (1774), which recognised Catholicism in Canada, two episodes which Clark ...”

“... has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a tradition of high-flying speculation about literature, which we costive islanders cannot afford not to profit by’. ‘Speculation’, ‘afford’ and ‘profit’ put a poet’s pressure on ‘costive’. Yet should Davie ...”

“... Then there was the coronation of Edward VII, his funeral eight years later, the coronation of George V, and the outbreak of war in 1914. All these events could be and often were commemorated by schools in song, and the Tonic Sol-fa movement, with its concentration on singing in unison, was perfect for encouraging national songs as demonstrations of ...”

“... in ‘anti-slavery gestures’, but it did lead to renunciation of further imports from Africa. Jefferson the Virginian slave-holder quite approved of this, realising that farmers and artisans in the Northern States where blacks were few did not want any more to be brought in to compete with them: but he helped to give slavery a wider diffusion in the new ...”

“... Gilbert has been living with Churchill for two decades; Dumas Malone has been communing with Jefferson for even longer. The demands of such single-minded scholarly devotion should not be underestimated. Bad biographies may be easy to write: good ones are much more difficult. This is especially true of the lives of major political figures. It is hard to ...”

“... happily, it’s interesting enough not to be smothered by them, either. Keats’s brother George was one of the tens of thousands who left Europe for the United States during the Tambora emergency, sailing from Liverpool in the summer of 1818. North America ‘in 1817-19 witnessed its first significant wave of refugee European migration in the 19th ...”

“... edition was far-reaching; it informed the English translation produced in the 1730s by George Sale, which was read by such figures as Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson. Bevilacqua devotes a chapter to the astonishing French scholar Barthélemy d’Herbelot, whose vast Bibliothèque orientale (1697) made the writings ...”

“... Sicily after victory over Sextus Pompey. Native Americans are compared with ancient Greeks, Thomas Jefferson with Pericles. Thus a dense community is built up, the Memoirs becoming an extended form of resistance to those who would sweep away tradition in the fury of their revolutionary ideals, replacing ‘days of connection’ with ‘days of ...”

“... out the familiar truths of national character. The dictionary had been undertaken by the publisher George Smith as a piece of private enterprise, with no official or institutional backing, and it had been brought to completion in record time by a very small staff. Less fortunate nations, in whom the spirit of liberty and energy of ‘character’ had been ...”

“... have always been easy pickings for conservatives appealing to their cultural grievances. But Jefferson Cowie, among others, has shown the extent to which this was the result of a specific political strategy, worked out in response to a specific political problem. Without taking workers’ votes from the Democrats, Nixon would never have been able to ...”

“... batteries, ammunition stores and protective walls. Even before the colonies declared independence, George Washington ensured that the Continental Army had a chief engineer; the founding of the US Army Corps of Engineers followed that of the United States itself by just three years.In 1802, Congress authorised the founding of the US Military Academy at West ...”

“... origin in the antebellum South, where Walter Scott’s novels were in every literate household. Jefferson Davis, the wartime president of the Confederate states, made a pilgrimage to Culloden four years after their defeat. Such thinking blossomed in the next decades, when in the imagination of its elites the South became like the Scotland of the ...”

“... was specially arranged to suit his sense of its importance, presided over by Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s appointee as head of the Department of Homeland Security, and conducted on Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial. ‘There was a very stiff breeze blowing across ...”

“... and left it at that, but he didn’t. It was in this wilderness of weeds and wildflowers that Mr George H. Hunter, whose mother had been born a slave, wished to place his grave. Mitchell’s interest​ in cemeteries was another relic of childhood that he brought with him to the writer’s life in New York City. He was kin by blood or marriage to people ...”

“... camera discredited their expression of piety otherwise displayed. (Frame Analysis) Sharper than George V, he spots a button undone: Young psychiatrists in state mental hospitals who are sympathetic to the plight of the patients sometimes express distance from their administrative medical role by affecting shirts open at the collar, much as do socialists in ...”