“... have given Margaret Thatcher. The uncertainty which the absence of a Parliamentary majority caused James Callaghan in the last Labour government was of a kind and degree for which many an American President would gladly have settled. The Constitution fragments political power by completely separating the executive from the legislature, and by separating both ...”

“... Here, he makes a genuine contribution. Looming over Rakove’s account is the figure of James Madison, the diminutive, colourless Virginian who, although never accorded the place in popular memory enjoyed by his contemporaries, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, fathered the Constitution and offered the most compelling rationale for ...”

“... in Panama with the indigenous people there rather than continue to sail north with the explorer William Dampier, thought the cultivation methods worth reporting: ‘the Indians set them’ – banana trees – ‘in rows or walks, without under-wood; and they make very delightful groves. They cut them down to get at the fruit; and the Bodies being green and ...”

“... The suicides of Harriet Shelley and Fanny Imlay, the deaths of Mary’s children Clare in 1818 and William in 1819, coming so close together must have had for her the weight of a curse. This story of 1820 seems to say that in a family where only forbidden affections can thrive it is better that all life cease. Read alongside Frankenstein, it also confirms Jay ...”

“... kangaroo, had on British zoology following the return of the Endeavour, the ship that carried James Cook and Joseph Banks to Australia. These animals became, in the course of the 19th century, the focus of disputes about mammalian classification. Darwin thought they might well be viewed as links between mammals, birds and reptiles. His bête ...”

“... Chronicle, the Annual Register and two West Country newspapers, with an occasional glance at James Fenimore Cooper’s history of the US Navy. The craft involved range from men-of-war and merchantmen to schooners, jollyboats and even small pleasure-craft, the capsizing of which would not normally count as shipwrecks. The author is not concerned with the ...”

“... the transgression of conventional ideas of beauty and decorum. This point was well made by James Northcote in a conversation reported by William Hazlitt about Il Giorno, Correggio’s altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with Saint Jerome and Mary Magdalene in Parma – a painting which was then so celebrated that all ...”

“... field.Only eight years before, the high master of the fee-paying Manchester Grammar School, Eric James, had argued against greater social mobility as an educational objective, writing in the Guardian that ‘we must recognise with greater frankness the facts of human inequality.’ True, he admitted, children at academically selective (as well as ...”

“... account of the siege of Derry. In the winter of 1688 the Catholic forces of the recently deposed James II surrounded the largely Protestant city. Its governor, Robert Lundy, wanted to negotiate surrender as they didn’t have the resources to withstand a prolonged siege. But thirteen apprentice boys defied him and closed the gates. Lundy was ...”

“... together in England’. Yet during the lifetime of its members, who also included the engineer James Watt, the manufacturer Matthew Boulton and the chemist and radical Joseph Priestley, the Society was barely visible in print. No learned memoirs appeared under its auspices, no grand assemblies were organised by its fellowship. According to the son of the ...”

“... novels of 1948, by the German Hans Habe (who had returned from exile in America) and the American William Gardner Smith. Both books portray affairs between black GIs and white German women that are ultimately doomed because of the attitude of the American army. Smith’s hero finds it odd that ‘in the land of hate, I should find this one all-important phase ...”

“... attitudes towards Jews of so many anti-alienists and fictional characters (the narrator in James Blyth’s Ichabod, for instance), Glover strongly reinforces Cheyette’s ambivalence thesis. Did liberal England die with the passing of the Aliens Act? Novels by Edgar Wallace and Violet Guttenberg – The Four Just Men (1905) and A Modern Exodus ...”

“... of the sedulous way Lahiri has written herself into a craftsmanlike tradition running back from William Trevor and Alice Munro, via Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and Dubliners, to the Russians translated by Constance Garnett. She has been admired since the beginning of her career for her restraint and the air of naturalness she gives her effects. It ...”

“... or did not happen in Marseille, it didn’t stop Krier from going to London in 1968 to work for James Stirling. Often described as the foremost British architect of the 20th century, Stirling was not somebody who appealed to the Prince of Wales. Indeed enthusiasts at Cambridge for the prince’s views on architecture did all they could to get the ...”

“... figure of Chatterjee’s book. In June 1756, Siraj laid siege to the British garrison at Fort William in Calcutta. The governor and many of the soldiers fled by boat. When those who remained surrendered, they were put in a small (or large) room, where, by the next morning, some (or many) had died of exhaustion, dehydration, asphyxiation or through ...”