“... is Richard Nixon, an embodiment of all that is best in the American character. By contrast, John Kennedy was a spoiled rich kid without principles or convictions, who thought he was above the law and ran around with glamorous women. Why, then, was Nixon’s Presidency a failure? The blame, Johnson contends, lies not with Nixon and the lies he told but ...”

“... muse lets rip through the rat-a-tat of Blind Hary’s Wallace; and in the brassy Reformation of John Knox it blares even in the sophisticated George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam ...”

“... presented a novelty of a still more dangerous sort, according to the dramatist and man of letters John Dennis. Heretics misconstrued religion, but did not set out to overturn the moral order. Mandeville, however, presented himself as ‘a serious, a cool, a deliberate champion’ of vice and luxury; a new kind of intellectual renegade such as ‘has never ...”

“... In the spring of 1958, my family moved from a rat-haunted tenement on King Street to one of the last remaining prefabs in Cowdenbeath. It was a move up, in most ways; the prefabs had been built as temporary wartime accommodation but, to my child’s mind at least, the cold and the damp, the putty-tainted pools of condensation on winter mornings and the airless heat of August afternoons were minor concerns compared with the pleasure of living on our own garden plot, in what was, essentially, a detached house, just yards from a stand of high beech trees where tawny owls hunted through the night, their to-and-fro cries so close it seemed they were right there with us, in the tiny bedroom I shared with my sister, Margaret ...”

“... seen at first sight’ was another of his aphorisms, one that he borrowed from Gotthold Lessing or John Opie, magpie that he was. ‘Every glance is a glance for study,’ he also said. The scene in Rain, Steam and Speed is of an imminent death, the instant of an action caught by a glance. A train rushes across a bridge and is bearing down on a hare that’s ...”

“... flowers to the wire fencing around the Rose and the Globe, had a familiar whiff.Andrew Gurr and John Orrell’s Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe concerns a project conceived well before the recent discoveries. But its primary aim – to present the case for a ‘reconstruction’ of the Globe Theatre in Southwark near the site of the original – might well ...”

“... in one of his late poems.In Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, his most celebrated poem (John Berger and Anna Bostock’s reissued translation omits the first three words of the title), Césaire is unsparing about Martinique. The Antillean islands are ‘pitted with smallpox’ and ‘dynamited by alcohol’. His home town is ‘inert’ and ...”

“... of friendship and common intellectual excitement at Cambridge was enormous. When James Klugman and John Cornford, the Panza and Quixote of Cambridge student Communism, came to his rooms in Trinity to recruit him for the Socialist Society, they found a natural, eager joiner. Dazzled by their friendship, he found his way to the Communist core of the society, of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in a little: ‘A hand or eye/By Hilliard drawn is worth an history/By a worse painter made,’ John Donne wrote in 1597. By a ‘history’ he means one of those big, populous, often Italian paintings much in demand among Elizabethan collectors – paintings you stand back from to see the drama of some mythological or biblical episode unfold. No one stands ...”

“... the catalogue commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam brothers. Cloud-capp’d towers, gorgeous ...”

“... that had scarcely yet been explored. More empirical work is needed before theory can advance, and John Springhall’s Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883-1940 (1977) offered one way forward: the systematic study of organisations designed for children. This approach has the additional advantage of illuminating many other dimensions of ...”

“... to know nothing of ‘the world’. ‘I am a child you know,’ he tells the young wards of John Jarndyce. ‘You are designing people compared with me.’ Skimpole’s main similarity to his real-life source, apart from a talent for accepting handouts, is his conversational manner, which is peculiarly fanciful, fluent and charming, but there are other ...”

“... the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an embarrassing but hardly revelatory find: the king was the company’s titular governor and historians have long known of his shareholding. But it vividly illustrates the fact that the elite had a stake in the seamiest forms of overseas expansion.Because companies landed in unmapped and poorly understood ...”

“... discovery of the body of Richard III, though there would be some mild satisfaction in finding the king exactly where the sources said he was. McFarlane wouldn’t have thought the body particularly informative as compared with the real stuff of history, some of the ex-duke of York’s receiver’s accounts, say, or records of Yorkist estate management.The TV ...”