“... triumphant eclecticism’. Among the figures he mentions are, of course, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones, the founder of Indology, whose researches on the Orient, Hinduism and the Sanskrit language include translations from – and, in effect, the recovery of – the great fourth-century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Yet Said is hard on Jones – ‘whereas ...”

“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... republicanism in recent years might be thought to have stimulated interest in Milton, but here Thomas Corns, editor of A Companion to Milton, sounds a warning note. This collection of essays, he writes, appears at a time when Milton’s standing with a wide readership appears ‘altogether more insecure’. In the US students prefer to study contemporary ...”

“... if not with the tactless first biographer or with the vindictive and family-proud nephew then with Thomas Carlyle or with Jane, or perhaps with Carlyle with reservations, or against him with no reservations at all. Froude gets the blame for striking the first blow, directed against the friend who had trusted him to do the right thing by his life and ...”

“... Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility with which ...”

“... most of the most outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William Carlos Williams wrote: ‘Bunting is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a ...”

“... jet airliners, worried about what the Russians were up to, and comforted by the Giles cartoon, the William Hickey column and The Adventures of Rupert Bear. As with most newspapers, the torrent these days has become a trickle – a trickle supervised in the Express’s case by an owner, Richard Desmond, who made a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as ...”

“... the early orchestral recordings, with their patchy intonation. Elgar, Adrian Boult, Henry Wood, Thomas Beecham: the gentleman-conductors held sway, stiff and upholstered on the podium, their white moustaches like frozen waterfalls, their batons cocked like riding crops. Elgar famously told the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin, who was about to record his Violin ...”

“... of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost critical tradition that ...”

“... other three – in 1962, 1966 and 1972 – were based on plans by the prominent architect-planner William Holford. The 1962 plan put Eros on a pedestrian plaza surrounded by office blocks; the one from 1966 included a raised-level piazza with traffic running underneath. One response to the 1962 proposal called it an ‘atrocity’ that would ‘entirely wipe ...”

“... a vat of nutrient juices had been a staple of speculative fiction at least since the 1920s. In ‘William and Mary’ from 1954 (twice rejected by the New Yorker), Dahl embeds that cliché of genre fiction in a dodgy relationship between a bullying academic husband and a resentful wife. The don agrees to have his brain taken out so it can live on after his ...”

“... Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt, who was then State Department Cyprus desk officer, has since told me that he went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you ...”

“... for authority. Ginsberg often claims to have issued indirectly from Whitman’s and directly from William Carlos Williams’s overcoat: but Williams’s presence of mind in language is quite different from Ginsberg’s, and his poems are far more fully composed. Most of Ginsberg’s poems document his time and collapse into it. They haven’t survived the ...”

“... Reformation; the first major ‘constellation’ contains More, the Italian city designers, and Thomas Müntzer. Strange companion-stars, one might well think, but, for the Manuels, they were all intent on specifying the nature of an ideal Christian society. Even if that be granted – and the dominant ideals of the Renaissance city-planners were surely ...”

“... institution’: racial slavery. The leaders of the Confederacy, explicitly repudiating Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that ‘all men are created equal,’ had committed themselves to racial hierarchy. ‘Our new government … rests,’ the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, observed, ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not ...”