“... found the photograph in the window of a barber shop in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in the north of the Cape Colony. It had been taken in Southern Rhodesia during the recent Ndebele rebellion against the British South Africa Company, when panicked settlers had laagered in Bulawayo and lynched suspected spies. Peter Halket, Schreiner’s fictional ...”

“... the coal pulled out of the ground in West Virginia, the sludge drawn from the shale sands in North Dakota, the electricity generated from the wind off Massachusetts, or the energy that gets collected from the sun in Nevada’. Or the data we generate, or the rain that falls on us. There are lots of public resources that could be used to help fund UBI ...”

“... called Kitty Hawk, seven hundred miles from Dayton, on a chain of islands and sandbars off North Carolina known as the Grand Banks. Wilbur wrote to the head of the Weather Bureau station on Kitty Hawk and had a letter back from the former postmaster, Bill Tate, who was to become a good friend and helper to the brothers. The issue wasn’t only the wind ...”

“... appeared posthumously. A selection from these posthumous books, called Last Poems and published by North Point in 1986, was made by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin. Michael Hamburger has published translations from Celan in increasing volume since a 1972 Selected from Penguin; Poems of Paul Celan, containing work from every one of Celan’s nine ...”

“... of a ‘reform of gesture’ gathering strength in 17th-century Europe, more powerfully in the North than in the South, which produced an ‘increasing distance between two body languages, which we might call the flamboyant and the disciplined’. Muchembled discerns a ‘sharp cultural differentiation’ between upper-class and lower-class bodily ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... which didn’t quite fit. The story of attorney Cromwell’s mission to Rome was first told by John Foxe in Actes and Monumentes, the ‘Book of Martyrs’. Foxe had to rescue his hero with some deft literary footwork, turning on its head the uncomfortable tale of Cromwell’s journey to the heart of Roman superstition and error. Elizabethan Protestants ...”

“... pairs two longish stories set in Scotland, David Craig’s ‘Jason and the Green Woman’ and John Murray’s ‘The Señor and the Celtic Cross’, which operate quite different ironies about the limits of civilised society. The latter story, told in a tormented parodic mélange of styles, recounts a tourist’s experience of sex, superstition and the ...”

“... the spirit of the new music in the same way that the voice of Mahalia Jackson identified Gospel. John Smith’s discography of Johnny Cash, who was resident in Memphis at the time and also benefited from Phillips’s expertise, contributes to the idea of a movement. Presley’s intelligence, however, has always been in doubt. Joe Esposito, his infamous ...”

“... of any literary stature were only too aware of the tradition of publishing correspondence. John Evelyn, for example, arranged his manuscript letter books to resemble a collection on the classical model. The privacy of the letter was a vexed issue. Once cast into the mailbag it was lost to the sender but might never arrive: ‘I am very uneasy about the ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... copy in Edinburgh University Library. In it he describes the ideal studio as having a northerly or north-easterly aspect, with light from a ‘great and fair’ window without ‘impeachment or reflections of walls or trees’. The crowded inner city setting of Gutter Lane may not have offered this luxury – in 1600 he complained that ‘the lights thereof ...”

“... worth speculating about. What, for example, is the truth of the legend that James Mill entrusted John Stuart’s political education to Place? Mr Miles does not touch on it. The story told in Iain McCalman’s Radical Underground is told perforce from the outside. There are no personal records to give an inner logic and life to the careers of the early ...”

“... his or her more settled home, dislocation turned into disorientation. Since the settlement of the North American continent proceeded roughly from east to west, the ‘West’ was a cultural as well as a geographical experience. To Mark Twain, whose letters from Nevada and California form the bulk of this long-awaited and deftly-annotated edition by the Mark ...”

“... Children in Bow had to sleep in their classrooms. Thousands of empty cars were left blocking the North Circular. The Duchess of Kent was unable to reach her flight at Stansted; the prime minister failed to get to a dinner at the Savoy. A monkey got lost in Oxford Street, and a Slavonian grebe – trying to migrate without sight of ground or stars – made a ...”