“... produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ...”

“... the thousands of young working men who flocked to hear him at mechanics’ institutes across the North and Midlands. ‘Trust thyself,’ he urged. ‘Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.’ ‘Insist on yourself; never imitate.’ Emerson, in turn, was a great influence on Smiles, who borrowed the term ‘self-help’ from Emerson’s lecture ...”

“... was a formal dinner in Chapultepec Castle hosted by the Mexican president, Porfirio Díaz, in 1889.North America was suffering from ‘Spanish fever’. The obsession with the Hispanic had begun to incubate in the 1870s, slowly overcoming the deeply entrenched myth of the Black Legend, which characterised Spain as a country of cruel and unenlightened Catholic ...”

“... The great auk, or garefowl, was a flightless North Atlantic seabird and it tasted delicious, perhaps a little like duck with a hint of seaweed. It’s hard to be sure because by the 1860s the great auk was extinct. It had once been abundant: in the 16th century, a breeding ground off Newfoundland – known as Funk Island for the overpowering stench of guano – offered a welcome source of sustenance for European sailors crossing the Atlantic ...”

“... the impression McEwen made in his life. He was born into a Scottish gentry family, the son of Sir John McEwen, Conservative under-secretary of state for Scotland, and his wife, Brigid Lindley. Rory and his five brothers and one sister grew up in Berwickshire in the family’s Palladian mansion, Marchmont. Commenting later on his interest in Redouté, he wrote ...”

“... scholar Ilan Stavans says he made it more American. Maybe, and not because he was trying to be John Berryman avant la lettre.) The chronology by Stephen Hart in Clayton Eshleman’s 700-page The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (2009) is a compilation of Vallejo’s most atrocious dramas. A murderous riot, tragic love ...”

“... their own glory or catastrophe. The stories hang together well, the odd man out being Corporal John Ledyard, a marine, of Groton, Connecticut. (Another Boy’s Own boy: Thomas Jefferson encouraged him to walk from Siberia to Nootka Sound, off Vancouver Island, and on to Virginia. He was arrested at Irkutsk and returned to the Polish border; later he was ...”

“... that power and freedom actually was. In 1976 workers at the Grunwick photo-processing plant in North London went on strike over working conditions and their employer’s refusal to let a union represent them. For two years the strike gathered a widening coalition of trade union allies, from local post office workers to Yorkshire miners. Grunwick’s ...”

“... how things would pan out in the end. During the dog days of the Vietnam War he was worried the North Vietnamese would ‘try to wait us out’, knowing that American public opinion was likely to lose patience. He concluded it was essential to project strength through massively enhanced bombing campaigns, to demonstrate that the US had the stomach for the ...”

“... recalls it in The Fall of Kelvin Walker, subtitled ‘A Fable of the Sixties’). It occurs to John Dyson, Frayn’s downtrodden hero, that ‘failure was the secular equivalent of sin.’ But even his failure now seems like success. He and Bob Bell work out of the same office collating ‘Years Gone By’ or ‘The Country Day by Day’, duelling with ...”

“... city, it is clear that since the publication of Race, Community and Conflict in 1967, Professor John Rex has been better informed and more perceptive than anyone else: and yet he has not become involved in political or advisory work, narrowly defined. He has spent most of the period building up important departments of sociology at Durham and Warwick and ...”

“... we need to know about Julia’s social position. Unobtrusive effects like this help to explain John Braine’s statement, reproduced on the dust-jacket of this new recruit to the trilogy, that a ‘whole generation of writers is in William Cooper’s debt, just as the previous generation was in James Joyce’s debt’. But this comparison, justified though ...”

“... Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm in Victorian Britain has recently been succeeded by a rightfully acclaimed historiographical work. Though three names appear upon the title page, they have pooled their intellectual capital to a ...”

“... became increasingly unsure whether he’d taken his sabbatical in Palm Springs or up on the bleak, north Norfolk coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on ...”

“... application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book. John Updike, who had a modest two wives and wrote 63 books, was, in a way, worldlier and more comfortable, finding nests at the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books that he never left. These writers are dead now, and the only thing that can be said with ...”