“... be kept firmly in their place. The great rebellion of 1760, described by the historian of Jamaica Edward Long as ‘the grand enterprise, whose object was no other than the entire extirpation of the white inhabitants’, provoked a change of policy on the island. The population of people of colour had grown substantially and some had become significant ...”

“... Chaucer served under three kings, honing his diplomatic skills in the last decades of Edward III, surviving the tumultuous reign of Richard II (1377-99), and gaining the favour of Henry IV before what must have been a rather sudden death in 1400. To contextualise his career, Turner provides an extensive political, social, economic and cultural ...”

“... metaphysical passage, a long poem every bit as wonderstruck and worshipful as John Dee and Edward Kelley when they scried their obsidian mirror, seeking to speak with angels. It begins, ‘Angels hovering all round,’ and then scatters, across nine pages, verses like fluttering cherubim, invocations to each of them:Heiglot,The angel of ...”

“... and almost thirty thousand men sailed for the West Indies under the newly promoted Vice Admiral Edward Vernon, hero of the recent taking of Porto Bello in Panama, to capture other key Spanish possessions in the region. Besides this main effort, a squadron of six warships and two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret ...”

“... the World Cup Final to take to the streets. The old Arab order was buried in Tahrir Square. Young revolutionaries rose up against a regime which for three decades had stood in the way of Palestinian aspirations. It seemed too good to be true and some pundits in Palestine wondered whether it wasn’t an American conspiracy. But it wasn’t, and ...”

“... I first went​ to Camberwell New Cemetery about six years ago, looking for the grave of a young man called Melvin Bryan, a petty criminal who died after being stabbed at a drug-house in Edmonton. Walking down the pathways and over the crisp, frozen leaves, I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones ...”

“... their affinity does not really go much deeper than the relaxed and genial style they share: only a young left-wing hothead, insisting always upon relevance and social engagement, would object to being compared with Holmes. As Lewis Thomas is none of these things, he will not mind it being said that his opening paragraph is very much in Holmes’s style: ‘I ...”

“... a lot of whisky’ before he found God. If Kavanaugh had simply said, as Bush did, ‘when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible,’ his confirmation would have been assured.)*President Trump claims that ‘China has been attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 election coming up in November ...”

“... shot Osama bin Laden. Respondents to O’Neill’s post on X, which was directed at a gaggle of young, male campaigners, wondered whether it was a lexical flub. But O’Neill followed up. He replied to the Democratic influencer Harry Sissons: ‘I’m telling you exactly what Betas like you will be used for: food and sex.’ Fucking and devouring, or ...”

“... It was the young Auden, writing at about the time he was composing his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, who declared that you could tell if someone was going to be a poet by considering his love of words. If he found words fascinating – their sounds, their peculiar symmetries and associations, their chimes, rhymes, assonances and quiddities – then he was likely to prove the real thing ...”

“... myopia from posterity, a spectrum of close to long-lookers can be drawn up: Hindenburg (+4.5D), Edward Gibbon (+4.37D), Martin Luther (+3.0D), Bismarck (−3.0D), Schopenhauer (−3.5D), Schubert (−3.75D), Beethoven (−4.0D), Gregor Mendel (−4.5D), Marie Antoinette (−4.0D), Goethe (−6.0D). The figures represent dioptres, which express the strength ...”

“... Impact on his Contemporaries, Ernst Honigmann took a hint from the socialist playwright Edward Bond, whose Bingo portrayed Shakespeare as guiltily complicit in contemporary social conflicts rather than serenely transcending them. Honigmann agreed that the biographical evidence supported a view of Shakespeare closer to Bond’s than to the bland ...”

“... most playful. But the presence of the Great Modernists feels as remote and irrelevant as that of Edward Marsh’s Georgians.Larkin, the lonely fugitive from poetic Modernism, now looks suspiciously like a one-man tradition. So standard an item in recent collections has the Philip Larkin Memorial Poem become that it now exists as a genre in its own ...”

“... important to him. And then there was Wagner, whose influence threatened to overwhelm him. As a young man, he found ways to dismiss the Ring, but Tristan and Parsifal exerted a force that could not be ignored and he had no choice but to make terms with them. The story of that accommodation was the story of his career as a composer, as Robin Holloway ...”

“... which have no apparent mechanisms for play, past or present, can be played with (as Cornell’s young neighbour showed), or look like they have been played with. However arduous he found the process of putting the right pieces together – there is evidence in his diaries that he was often tormented by the exercise – the boxes in their final state always ...”