“... square and began to hawk their merchandise. Their tobacco, a Euro-American blend called Saint-Vincent, could not in theory compare to the Chesapeake leaf offered by the General Farm – although, as Kwass points out, Farm agents themselves often adulterated their product with wood shavings, ashes, pulverised brick or even plain dirt. But Mandrin was ...”

“... Baker and now, it seems (though he is regrettably attached to the idea of famous names and dates), John MacGregor. It owes rather more perhaps to the HMIs, who in a series of reports have drawn attention to the devastating consequences of abandoning history in favour of such invertebrate programmes of study as those which go under the name of ...”

“... in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to ...”

“... and beat him into signing a statement accusing his mother. Her authority is ‘the historian Vincent Cronin, writing in 1974’ – close to source, then. The effect of the accusations, brought out in open court, was to swing some sympathy Antoinette’s way, at least in the public gallery. That didn’t, of course, influence the verdict. It was a show ...”

“... crouch four chained figures representing the major battles Nelson won against the French: Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. The figures do not look like Africans, but they are black, they are manacled and I was not the only child in Liverpool who took them to be slaves.This mistake was actually an insight, because the monument registers the ...”

“... a heroic Spanish peasant, with a script by Hollywood’s most prominent communist, the playwright John Howard Lawson. Strenuously opposed by groups like the Knights of Columbus and the Legion of Decency, as well as the Vatican, Blockade was the occasion for what Doherty calls ‘the most acrimonious case of doctrinal difference among movie-minded Catholics in ...”

“... malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of ...”

“... got Johnny Depp prancing around wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t ...”

“... set against a dull gold ground on the walls of the churches of Saint Germain-des-Prés and Saint Vincent-de-Paul, works in which the Greek and the Gothic are condensed into an exalted style that may one day be acknowledged as more original than the gross realism of Courbet. In these murals, Flandrin had made an artistic decision that was to have enormous ...”

“... principles of activity, co-operation and all-round development, which he established in Vincent Square in 1826 under the guidance of the educationalist James Buchanan, and where his daughter was enrolled. Buchanan’s childlike imagination and simplicity instilled in Bodichon and many other pupils an awareness of the natural world and the beauty of ...”

“... chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became a lawyer instead of the founder of the Astronomical Society; in Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal at the Greenwich Observatory; in Mungo Park, the African explorer and the first European to reach the Niger; in ...”

“... Christianity when so lightly passing over the reference to the lamb of God in the Revelation of St John: ‘Come hither, I will show thee the Bride, the Lamb’s wife’ (21.9). John Boswell, in Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, sees in this metaphor ‘a hint of bestiality’ which raises problems that ‘were rarely ...”

“... councillors) who were unhappy with the decisions that had been made on the budget – the mayor, John Biggs, was seen by the left as a Blairite stooge. Sympathetic insiders passed on intel. People from the campaign turned up at Biggs’s weekly surgery, introducing Expand Not Extinguish and demanding that the council consult with them. Biggs agreed, on ...”

“... his equilibrium on a diet of Special Brew and pirate tapes) to calibrating the minutiae of Frank Vincent Zappa’s monstrous oeuvre. It’s a stroll to realign (straighten out) the gross products of this freak-wrangler supreme, the Laurel Canyon, cottage industry, family man. Zappa: boastfully non-PC, polymorphously perverse, the L. Ron Hubbard of ...”

“... a range of examples from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of one-way crack, or ‘entertaining ...”