“... all of which began publishing them. On 28 June Ellsberg surrendered to Federal authorities in Boston. He was charged with a variety of felonies, although after carefully researching the matter, his attorney told him that he had probably not violated any existing law. As it happened, his fate wasn’t decided by a jury, but instead became enmeshed with the ...”

“... last crusade; in a formal and spectacular sense, his career ended when Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer and counsel for the army, replied to the ascription of Communist connections to a young lawyer on his staff: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been launched in ...”

“... outlays, preventing a proper balance between investment and consumption. Some critics, such as Richard Rose and Guy Peters in Can governments go bankrupt? (1978), insist that this imbalance is ‘bankrupting’ the state. The second form of this argument stresses that many social programmes indirectly impede the mobility of capital and labour. It is ...”

“... Britain’s system of imperial preference. (One Conservative peer referred to the demand as the ‘Boston Tea Party in reverse’.) Many saw imperial preference not only as the economic backbone of empire, but also as a means of mitigating what promised to be Britain’s very weak postwar position: giving up its system of trade barriers and exchange controls ...”

“... suddenly he would break into a big smile. He was gracious, but he said what he thought.’ Like Richard Yates, a near contemporary and friend who was also famous on the writing-school circuit for not being famous, Williams served in the war and had a few unsuccessful marriages, drank too much, promoted a writerly ideal of Flaubert-like strenuousness, and ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”

“... with a more equal pay structure. From 2001-5 the two most unequal teams (the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox) won the greatest number of games; the two most equal teams (the Colorado Rockies and Kansas City Royals) won the fewest. You can see the same thing happening in English football: very rich, inegalitarian Chelsea do better than relatively ...”

“... Where you from anyway, the New York Times?’ The convention floor was less glitzy than it was in Boston, less neon, more intimate. The Bush crowd will spend the week in a show of machismo – how tough we are, how resolute – while their every move would show itself to be defensive. In its heart the administration knows it’s in trouble, and it ...”

“... made its initial move from exteriority to interiority doesn’t much concern Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman. Their book is an essay on the ‘historical construction and the political uses of trauma’ and a report on anthropological fieldwork aimed at ‘denaturalising’ it and ‘repoliticising victims’. Working in a Foucauldian tradition, they ...”

“... already black commas. She circles back to certain touchstones: a visit to a tattoo shop in Boston, summers working as a nanny, a brief teenage encounter with an Estonian man, the widow Mangada. ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ is based on the ‘Hospital Notes’ Plath took down when she ‘worked part-time as a secretary in the adult ...”

“... culture’ of the sort we nostalgically project on the 18th-century Paris salon, the 19th-century Boston drawing room, or the Manhattan loft of the 1930s, is a debatable question. What seems beyond dispute is that academic criticism is at the centre of whatever literary culture we do have at the present time. This is something to which all its opponents ...”

“... Marjorie Perloff cannot resist remarking that the dancer ‘did not know who the Lowells of Boston were, and did not fully appreciate that her lover was a Great Poet’. More to the point, perhaps, Lowell’s behaviour was not only that of a poet-king in disguise but that of a tycoon acting in the normal way. Axelrod spends much of his introductory ...”

“... what need is there for teachers of morality or religion? Emerson, a familiar listener to the Boston liturgy written by Hazlitt’s father, took this view of the matter in his ‘Divinity School Address’. He remembered the sensation of being cooped up in the house of worship with the faithful, while outside he could see a truer subject of ...”

“... defined by reference to the Earth’s dimensions. When Britain obstructed these strange notions, Richard Cobden lamented his countrymen’s ‘Chinese conservatism’. On the whole, however, co-operation outweighed controversy. The French dominated the natural sciences and mathematics, but admired the British steam engine and its manifold applications. At ...”