“... in the Chinese film industry). Undeterred, in February last year Bob Seeley, a Tory MP, and James Rogers of the Henry Jackson Society, a right-wing think tank, published a pamphlet called Global Britain: A Blueprint for the 21st Century. This suggested, among other things, that the £300 million bill for the BBC World ...”

“... his African homeland, Tony Small watched a battle.’ The original readers of Scott and G.P.R. James would have responded to that opening sentence. Tony Small is a young black slave who escaped when the war compelled his owners to abandon their house and plantation near Charleston. Scavenging by night among the human wreckage of the battlefield, he comes ...”

“... sphygmomanometers that had become available for the accurate measurement of blood pressure. Sir James Mackenzie, the patron, and Thomas Lewis, the leader of the scientific school and as much a physiologist as a physician, still held that ‘the trained finger’ was the best instrument for measuring arterial pressure. Science made perhaps its first ...”

“... stay in Italy. Then after Christmas I read Gabriele Annan’s review in the LRB (7 January) of James Fox’s The Langhorne Sisters – Nancy had been the middle one of the five – and began to understand. Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now in his nineties and still ...”

“... but were attracted by the turbulent commercial opportunities of early 19th-century Liverpool. James Clough was an adventurous and irrepressibly optimistic merchant, determined to succeed, and prepared to take risks. In 1822 the flourishing transatlantic cotton trade tempted him to move his family to Charleston, in South Carolina. The road to prosperity ...”

“... they knew that it was modern.’ The modernists certainly took to her; she was published alongside James Joyce, positively reviewed by H.D. and praised as being ‘above praise’ by Marianne Moore. ‘If we choose to leave the poems of Charlotte Mew out of our literary heritage,’ Moore wrote, ‘we are leaving out an original.’The speakers of Mew’s ...”

“... from every corner of the earth. The very best ironies live their lives inside other ironies. Henry VIII changed his relationship with the Catholic Church so as to enable himself to marry his chosen bride. (Sadly, something happened to her.) Five hundred years later, Prince Charles changes the date of his wedding to his chosen bride so as to attend the ...”

“... rule) and new arguments toxic to the authority of monarchs had mutated in the decades following Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s and the Marian burnings of the 1550s. Disgusted at England’s heresy, and coming increasingly within the scope of treason law, English Catholic émigrés and exiles launched ferocious attacks on Elizabeth’s ...”

“... no doubt merely reminded his mentor of the limited facilities for shaving in submarines: but James Joyce’s young man resents his friend’s analysis and calls him a sulphur-yellow liar. We do resent, it seems, having our erotic or quasi-erotic motives explained to us; perhaps not so much because we all feel the explanation to be false, though that ...”

“... the people who thought they were closest to him realise how little they knew about him. His son Henry remembered once playing a memory game with him: My father, after many turns, had successfully gone through the long string of words, and finished up with his own contribution, ‘Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand.’ He gave this with an odd twinkle in his ...”

“... its origins in the 1680s, in the response to the invigorated absolutism of Louis XIV in France and James II in England. The French Protestants who fled persecution, and Locke, who hid in the Dutch republic from agents sent by James II to capture him, were credited with formulating new ideas about religious ...”

“... his material.Produced under Fascism in 1943, Visconti’s Ossessione (an unauthorised version of James M. Cain’s hardboiled novel The Postman Always Rings Twice) is generally considered the first Neorealist film, but it was Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), the first movie made after the war to represent the recent Italian past, that planted the ...”

“... particular the loneliness of his early years. Havelock Ellis (he was to drop the family first name Henry for effect) was born in Croydon, to a maritime family (he shared this background with his distant admirer Edward Carpenter). His early years were given over to colonial journeyings that left him self-conscious and unhappy: there were two voyages to ...”

“... as being at once too ‘plotless’ (or, as Washington Irving put it – before Cooper, Hawthorne, James and others – too lacking in ‘association’) and ‘stiflingly, even obsessively over-plotted’. There is a relationship, in Fender’s reading of American literature, between plotting and landscape which can be ...”

“... The next stage of myth-making made Revere and his compatriots more active and aggressive. In 1861, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet laureate of New England, wrote the famous poem, which generations of American schoolchildren were required to learn by heart, and which depicted Revere as a ‘Lone Rider’ who singlehandedly awoke the good people of ...”