“... The name​ given to Phillis Wheatley by her family is lost. She may have been born in modern-day Senegal or Gambia, and was called ‘Phillis’ after the ship in which she was forcibly transported to Boston in 1761. Wheatley was the name of the prosperous merchant family who purchased her ‘for a trifle’ – ‘a slender, frail, female child, supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth’, and dressed in ‘a quantity of dirty carpet’, according to Margaretta Odell, an unreliable Victorian descendant of the Wheatleys ...”

“... says with dry understatement. Brown adopts a different approach. His starting point is Friday, 8 May 2009. He picks it because it was an ordinary day in the life of a prime minister, and he wants us to know how extraordinary that is. His day starts at 5 a.m., with a spell on the Downing Street treadmill, before arriving at his desk to work on two important ...”

“... West who have no visceral understanding of the risks posed by infectious illness. In addition, as David Runciman has pointed out, politicians and government don’t get credit for the disasters and failures they prevent. The combination of these two factors – generational obliviousness and the bias away from the good governance of prevention – goes a long ...”

“... Cruises, a line of defence that Berlusconi would never fall back on. In that sense the shipwreck may yet come to be seen not as an echo of Berlusconi’s premiership, but as a foreshadowing of Monti’s, as he carries out the wishes of the EU, the IMF and the bond markets – if he stays in power long enough to do their bidding. Monti governs only by ...”

“... drawings relating to the Whitechapel Boys: the group of Jewish painters and writers (they included David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg) who met in the library in the early decades of the 20th century. In the space at the top of the old library building is a selection, made by Michael Craig-Martin, of ‘great early buys from the ...”

“... death in 1969. That year came two editions of the Memoirs, one edited by Pierre Citron, the other David Cairns’s translation. Critical editions of Berlioz’s other writings, and his Correspondance Générale, are well advanced; critical and analytical scholarship has moved into top gear in Germany, the United States and Britain; the New Berlioz ...”

“... Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper ...”

“... stasis, scattering, reconstruction – is typical of many libraries from the 17th century. David Pearson’s Book Ownership in Stuart England gives us a superlative tour of just about everything we might want to know about the early modern culture of book buying, borrowing, listing, shelving, storing and displaying. The ‘backbone’ of his ...”

“... or derision. He entirely eluded the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of David Hume in the 18th. Even the Jacobin William Godwin, the first champion of the Civil War radicals, judged his exploits ‘scarcely worthy to be recorded’, and S.R. Gardiner’s comprehensive history of the Commonwealth contained only two references to ...”

“... two days. Then I bought and read in a similar manner – none took me any longer than two days – David Szalay’s three previous novels: London and the South-East (one of the great mocking titles, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, or Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration), The Innocent and Spring. I want to say that here is a ...”

“... their doubts about the desirability and viability of such a strategy. One of the many virtues of David Armitage’s Ideological Origins of the British Empire is that its author is markedly transatlantic in background, and consequently able to understand and mediate between these very different intellectual sensibilities and scepticisms. Trained at Princeton ...”

“... care to reward their poets, for they determine if and how their patrons will be remembered. You may think, St John continues, that the Greeks won at Troy and that Penelope was faithful to her husband because it pleased Homer to say so, but the facts are otherwise: E se tu vuoi che ’l ver non ti sia ascoso, tutta al contrario l’istoria converti: che i ...”

“... who think it only goes to show what a bunch of interfering megalomaniac know-nothings editors are may be appeased by rule of thumb no. 6: ‘Good editing can turn a gumbo of a piece into a tolerable example of good reporting . . . Good writing exists beyond the ministrations of any editor . . . A good editor is a mechanic, or craftsman, while a good ...”

“... In Frank Auerbach’s Recent Pictures, at Marlborough Fine Art (until 24 October), there may appear to be a compulsive zest. Alleyway and streetscape, seated figure and reclining head, are confidently asserted, eyes jabbed into expression, zig-zag strokes softening edges and sawing up the sides of tower blocks across the Hampstead Road ...”

“... Black bohemia, especially its musicians. (She was briefly married to the tenor saxophonist David Murray, Hemphill’s bandmate in the World Saxophone Quartet.) Raised in Columbus, Ohio, she settled in New York City in the early 1970s, after studying microbiology at Howard University. While modelling to make ends meet, she became the only female member ...”