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“... slavery as their vote-getter, while the new Republicans, descendants of the Federalist Party of Adams and Washington, took their stand on anti-slavery and free labour. ‘I remember once being much amused,’ Lincoln wrote in a letter of 1859, at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long, and ...”

“... American of no known address, is possibly the most accomplished writer of prose in English since James Joyce. This is not to say that he is also the best novelist, whatever that would mean, but that sentence by sentence he can do more than any novelist of this century with the resources of the English-American language and with the various media by which it ...”

“... themselves within a political heritage usually misrepresent their forbears: the Spenserians of James I’s reign, and Milton after them, re-cast Spenser in their own image. The process Norbrook describes, of adaptation within continuity, runs parallel to, and seems largely to have been created by, the tradition which has been located by Simon ...”

“... increase its standing. The Founding Fathers – including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton – enjoy widespread, if superficial, public recognition. By comparison, key framers of the Reconstruction Amendments – James Ashley, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens ...”

“... took down a Palestinian flag at City College and replaced it with an American flag, Mayor Eric Adams said: ‘Blame me for being proud to be an American … We’re not surrendering our way of life to anyone.’ This was, of course, a ludicrous expression of xenophobia – and it’s hard to imagine Adams, or any ...”

“... After Matthew Lyon, a Congressman with a printing press, was sent to prison under President John Adams’s controversial Sedition Act of 1798, which prohibited citizens from criticising the government, his son James Lyon reprinted the biography, omitting the bits about the Deists and Socinians to let the prophet’s life ...”

“... He sieved biographies, letters and accounts of those he considered great men – whether John Adams or Confucius – to produce poems with distinct overtones of hero-worship. In politics this tendency led to his admiration for Mussolini, and even to that view of Hitler as ‘a Saint’. While caged in Pisa in the closing days of the war, he set to work on ...”

“... to admit their real existence among us.’ But others, including George Washington and John Adams, already regarded the unconfined soul of Shakespeare as belonging more securely to the land of the free than to the land of his birth, and the first American edition of the Complete Works – a piracy of an English text, but with an added preface reassuring ...”

“... The only parts that entirely escape his engagement are those ‘historical’ sections (the Adams cantos, the Chinese cantos, and so forth) which seem to him not otherwise translated into ‘poetry’ by their beauty of style. The problems raised by Carpenter’s biography are more sharply focused by Casillo’s work. The difference comes from ...”

“... The British press did not bother much about the country either, and British academics (apart from James Dunkerley) have, for the most part, steered clear; it was an expensive and dangerous place to send your research students to. For the Americans, however, Guatemala has long been the most significant country in Central America – far more so than Nicaragua ...”

“... who constitute a priesthood: ‘the death-of-language writers are self-ordained priests’ (James Stalker, in Greenbaum). John Silverlight, in his excerpted columns about usage and abusage that constitute Words, is prompt to make clear that he is playing down, not laying down, the law: ‘What I am not, to the disappointment of some colleagues, is a ...”

“... Eliot and Pound were both bricoleurs, but they were purposeful: the great chunks of Jefferson and Adams and Confucius that find their way into The Cantos illustrate Pound’s version of history, and are intended to show how the chaos of the present might be redeemed if we could only be led to make sense – his sense, that is – of the past. But not all ...”

“... waiting, ‘indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself’, as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its ...”

“... Henry A. Wise, a Southern member of Congress and a future Confederate general, called John Quincy Adams ‘the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed’. Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created equal’ – but, as ...”

“... club, Summertown Stars, and sent me to the local Church of England school, St Philip and St James. I was already a competitive, sport-obsessed child, and responded to the sense of cultural difference by exaggerating it. During a classroom discussion – I can’t remember about what exactly – I quoted the great Green Bay Packers football coach, Vince ...”