“... from the mid-1950s onwards can be attributed to a man whose name is not well remembered now: James Allardice. He was the jobbing TV writer responsible for the monologues (‘host wraps’) that Hitchcock delivered in his comically lugubrious style, introducing each episode and providing a link into the commercial breaks. They set the tone of both series ...”

“... men’. Then follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... Blake Morrison begins his account of the murder of James Bulger with a delicate diversion into the story of the Children’s Crusade. The year 1212: at Saint-Denis, a boy of 12 begins to preach. He has received word from God that it is the mission of Christian children to free the Holy Land from the infidel. He draws crowds, draws followers: boys and girls swarm from street and field ...”

“... lie, murder, steal – anything! But the healing aspect was still just as prominent: Alice James, neglected sister of Henry and William, found temporary relief through hypnosis during her terminal cancer. She viewed it quite differently from du Maurier’s character: hypnosis, she dictated to her diary, seemed to ...”

“... the contents of Mitford’s parcel were emptied out onto the table, the collector – one Thomas James Wise – recognised the momentous find and bought all dozen copies.So the story went, at any rate. But the entire tale – sausages and all – was made up by Wise. In reality the book didn’t exist before 1893, when Wise himself had forged it, concocting ...”

“... Galicia, which is now part of Ukraine. (He may well be related to the great American Modernist, Henry Roth, the author of Call It Sleep, who was born in Galicia in 1907, and who emigrated to America a year later. In Joseph Roth’s most obviously Jewish novel, Job, published in 1930, a family of Russian Jews do indeed emigrate to New York, though Joseph ...”

“... I first came across James Boyce five years ago, when he wrote the lead essay in a collection called Whitewash, intended to argue against the ruthlessly revisionist ‘frontier history’ of Keith Windschuttle. In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), Windschuttle had argued that, contrary to the claims of various ideologically driven left-leaning historians, very few Tasmanian Aborigines had died in conflict with whites ...”

“... century yields some stimulating and even startling results. ‘Analogies between J.S. Mill and Sir Henry Newbolt,’ the author remarks, have not ‘been part of the regular currency of cultural history’. He can say that again, and a reviewer, unwilling to spoil the audience’s enjoyment by giving away the plot, may rest content to leave matters there. At ...”

“... Monkey’ (1934) and Eudora Welty’s ‘Clytie’ (1941) are good examples to be found here. But Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ arguably starts from a Gothic setting, and even with the heroine donning her wrap to set forth on a perilous trail of curiosity. Of course James brilliantly transcends Gothic ...”

“... bawdiness (‘fancy him, darling?’): the effect is rather like Arthur Balfour voicing Sid James. ‘Enter toge,’ Chapter 1 begins, ‘wheeled slowly in by French and German ladies of vague conditions in life.’ Or: ‘he himself rated success in flesh to include dogs, rain rope, and also a certain condition of Asiatic elation.’ Or: ‘art ...”

“... with more fillers than prizes. The best things are from the youngest contributors, such as James Campbell and Alan Hollinghurst, and the less youthful A.E. Ellis. Each here performs the same narrative trick, telling some resonant or portentous tale through more or less awkward or impercipient or blindly obsessive observers. In Hollinghurst’s ‘A ...”

“... devoted to it (‘The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit’ at www.detroityes.com). Hitler had a photo of Henry Ford on his office wall; some people attribute the industrial systems of the death camps to Ford’s influence. In 1957 the GM President declared: ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for America, and vice versa.’ The postwar scheme to span the US ...”

“... were put on the Memory of the World Register (the list of documentary heritage launched in 1997): James Cook’s journal of the Endeavour, written in his own hand; and the Edward Koiki Mabo Papers, the record of Eddie Mabo’s landmark case before the High Court, which gave legal recognition to the fact that indigenous land ownership existed before European ...”

“... leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy derived from the paternal ...”