“... arrest for a crime he didn’t commit. As he’s driven away by the police, the musician (it’s Henry Fonda) glimpses his wife, who doesn’t yet know he’s been arrested, moving around in the kitchen. When describing this scene to Truffaut, Hitchcock dwelled on details that either weren’t in the film to begin with, or got edited out. At the corner of ...”

“... seductively in his recent memoir, Between the World and Me. Formally modelled on the first part of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the book is addressed to Coates’s teenage son, Samori, on the occasion of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian ...”

“... With his first earnings as a garden labourer, the boy walked to Aberdeen and bought six volumes of James Hervey’s Reflections on a Flower Garden – just as Clare had tramped from Helpston to Stamford, before the bookshop opened, to secure a coveted copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. And like Clare, Sinclair paused on ...”

“... the impossibility of predicting the behaviour of a turbulent system. Early on, Foden’s narrator, Henry Meadows, quotes a line attributed to Einstein: ‘Before I die, I hope someone will clarify quantum physics for me. After I die, I hope God will explain turbulence to me.’ (With what turns out to be habitual pedantry, Meadows notes that the line has also ...”

“... and intellectually arrogant. He was related on his mother’s side to the Wadsworths (as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); his father, from a more colourful background, was a government employee at the Mint. Philadelphia was a financial centre, with thriving exchanges and a bourse; it had not produced great writers. It was only after meeting William ...”

“... is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s ...”

“... alienated large numbers of patrician supporters. So crowd action contributed to the expulsion of James II in 1688, to the overthrow of Godolphin’s Whig administration in 1710, and to the resignation of the Duke of Newcastle in 1756 and of Lord Bute in 1763. Much of this analysis will be familiar to experts in the field, but Gilmour’s lucidity, pungency ...”

“... brief career, Girtin had quite willingly accepted a commission from the publisher-cum-antiquarian James Moore to produce an extensive series of finished watercolours of castles and monastic ruins; these drawings were based on rough sketches done by Moore himself, who subsequently arranged for several of the Girtins to be issued in the form of aquatints. This ...”

“... had on the foreign policy-making apparatus in Washington. President Bush, his Secretary of State James Baker, and dozens of top officials on the National Security Council and in US Intelligence, were familiar with Saddam’s brand of state tyranny long before August 1990. The Iranian Revolution, and with it the perceived threat to the Arab oil states of an ...”

“... fortunes of the Earl of Warwick, but at the end of his life felt guilty for his betrayal of King Henry – as it happens, held prisoner in the same building as Malory, as Malory was actually writing. Many things still remain obscure, even after Field’s detached, painstaking, and blessedly unsentimental sifting of the sources. It seems unlikely that we will ...”

“... Cruikshank, like Giorgione, could be read on many different planes, just as a cartoon featuring Henry Fox and labelled ‘Volpone’ could be appreciated by those who had never heard of Ben Jonson. Yet if cartoons assuredly were not ‘high art’, they certainly must not be seen as part of the ‘little tradition’. Cartoons were an expression of that ...”

“... railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems the War turned into momentously general truths, as in an echo of Empson: It’s not diseases, but the void that kills, The space, the ...”

“... honour of the Old. In England the foundation of Regius Chairs of Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge by Henry VIII, and later the influence of Rabbinical studies on James I’s Authorised Version, demonstrated the enhanced academic status of Hebraic studies, which were distinguished by the findings of Edward Pococke and John ...”

“... dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour was a baronetcy conferred by James I in 1622, largely to raise revenue; the first baronet must have been a disappointment in that regard, as he went to prison for debt in 1629 and again in 1638. His son and heir was imprisoned for political reasons in 1646, and pardoned in 1651. The third ...”

“... the most dubious morality. Building on the classic image of Walsingham as spymaster established by James Anthony Froude’s History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for ...”