“... of the 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the shoddy detritus of ...”

“... myself I’m Gay Talese again.’ ‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican ...”

“... in the 1960s was merely the prototype for the full-scale invasion of privacy that, as revealed by Edward Snowden, has since become standard government procedure; Abu Ghraib was merely the tip of the iceberg of ‘enhanced interrogation procedures’ still secretly in use in the endless war on terror. At our current moment, amid pervasive public ignorance ...”

“... a philandering husband and a jealous wife. She had a few affairs, one in Deia on Mallorca with a young Scotsman who turned up at her door with a gold and green enamel lighter, claiming she’d left it in the American Bar. Another with a polo player. After riding, Larsen wrote gleefully, she was too sore to sit at the typewriter. When she finally sent off her ...”

“... politicians dominated New Labour cabinets in Westminster but failed to cultivate voters or young politicians at home, and didn’t see the potential for the new devolved parliament to become the SNP’s power base.It’s now almost impossible for Labour to win under the first-past-the-post system that Blair chose to preserve, ignoring the ...”

“... One of the first people to register the dangers of this system was the constitutional scholar Edward Samuel Corwin. In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Michigan in 1946 (later published as Total War and the Constitution), Corwin argued that the American state had been irreversibly altered by the dramatic expansion of executive power ...”

“... or spent on fighting fellow Greeks. Its real legacy was to give international credibility to a young Greek government that was quickly losing control of its own revolution.Most English-language histories of Greece’s revolution are concerned with the story of the philhellenes rather than with the Greeks themselves. But for Mazower, Byron and the others ...”

“... there are a few from 1734-35, nothing from 1736. By 1738, Johnson is writing fairly frequently to Edward Cave, on business connected with the Gentleman’s Magazine. In the 1740s he is launched – from our point of view – as a letter-writer, with a circle of friends and acquaintances sufficient to elicit sequences of correspondence. The Johnson of ...”

“... Book because its editor claims that Wallace Stevens has ‘shaped’ the style of our brightest young writers. The anthology may not begin with ‘Sunday Morning’, but Jonathan Barker suggests that Ron Butlin, James Lasdun, Oliver Reynolds and other talents have been influenced, like Vendler’s Americans, by the world of Canon Aspirin. This seems ...”

“... and two more abandoned by their crews, he asked ‘whether the registered owner of these ships, Edward Bates, is the member for Plymouth, or if it is some other person of the same name’. Plimsoll’s campaign, as Cocks points out, is a vivid illustration of the importance of the immunity of parliamentary speech from the law of defamation. By ...”

“... entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and attention-seeking poet. Dunbar is the first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court ...”

“... and it reproduced the famous propaganda poster, Ulster 1914, with the province personified as a young woman with long, flowing hair, defiantly carrying a rifle against a Union Jack, and proclaiming: ‘Deserted! Well – I Can Stand Alone.’ Part of Godson’s theme is Unionist or Protestant solitariness, their distrust of the English, and commitment to ...”

“... 1788 around Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White ...”

“... tracking one down to the Colorado desert, where he was approached by a member of the crew, a young man of ‘Nordic’ appearance, wearing what appeared to be ski pants. He had soft, unblemished skin, long, flowing hair and sparkling white teeth. Communicating telepathically, he explained that his name was Orthon, that he came from Venus, and that he was ...”

“... solicitor and his mother a teacher of Latin and Greek. It was a household that valued learning and Edward and Mildred Ede were not so straitlaced as Jim was wont to suggest. They were, however, children of the 1860s. Jim liked to tell the story of the silver paper knife his father brought home on one occasion with a handle in the shape of a naked woman, and ...”