“... permission for this and fingers those notorious reactionaries and outspoken Dyer supporters, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, and Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, then war secretary, but he can find no trace of the necessary arrangements in the papers of either ‘Jix’ or ‘Worthy’, suggesting that even they felt the need to conceal what they ...”

“... rendition mirrored the depiction of Reconstruction offered by leading academics such as William Dunning of Columbia University, who served as president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. ‘The negro,’ Dunning wrote in Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-77 (1907),had no pride of ...”

“... folding later in the week. On her day off, Rebecca scrubbed dirt from the clothes of her husband, James, and their three children. The family lived not far from the Roman Baths and close to the River Avon, but there was no direct water supply to the last house on Back Street Place.Rebecca wanted her daughter Rose to have a different life and sent her to ...”

“... and youth, lamenting ‘comrades’ who ‘each have perished, silent and alone’, evoking William Cowper’s poem ‘The Castaway’, whose speaker mourns his ‘comrades’ and writes that ‘We perish’d, each alone.’ In May 1925, just after her press published these poems, Virginia Woolf sketched some ideas for her next novel. It would ‘have ...”

“... Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up Cavendish’s World’s Olio was probably the philologist Thomas Jefferson Conant. A Louisville china ...”

“... Catholic and an activist for social justice whose life until that point – studying the poetry of William Empson, training for the priesthood, setting up Church Action on Poverty to campaign for a minimum wage and mastering Labour’s housing brief in opposition – hadn’t obviously pointed him towards the energy portfolio in government. Today he is no ...”

“... the accusation which Yeats thirsted for (at least once) is forthcoming: You got the chance, William, the chance of your words, since courage and beauty had their flagpoles through your side. You acknowledged them in one way, but there is an excuse on your lips, the excuse that did not spoil your poetry, for every man has his excuse. In the previous ...”

“... in Barcelona before 1900 it would certainly be the woodcuts by the ‘Beggarstaff Brothers’, James Pryde and William Nicholson, with their drastic simplifications and combinations of form, their thick flowing outlines, their half-lyrical, half-grotesque urban types, their incisive characterisation. Richardson concedes ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by Imagism. Now he ...”

“... The Titanic was a ship of fools. As John Wilson Foster tells us, the grand staircase came in William and Mary style, though the balustrade was Louis XIV; the first-class dining saloon and reception rooms were Jacobean, the restaurant Louis XVI, the lounge Louis XV (Versailles), the reading and writing-room late Georgian, the smoking-room early ...”

“... of 1849 and the expansion of the railways. Stereotyping flourished; in The Yellow Peril (1982), William F. Wu writes that the Chinese in America ‘were viewed as inscrutable, wildly excitable, of low intelligence, and of high and complex intelligence ... as extremely able workers yet low on the evolutionary scale. Occupational stereotypes include tong ...”

“... Ironically, Coleman’s ostentatious deference to the authority figures in Lennon’s life – William Ernest Pobjoy, the luckless headmaster of Quarry Bank Grammar School, once tannoyed at Goodison Park to deal with an outbreak of Lennonist insurbordination, Aunt Mimi (‘the guitar’s alright as a hobby, but you’ll never make a living’), and the ...”

“... has not happened in Australia. There is nothing comparable to the influence of Walt Whitman, Henry James or T.S. Eliot, say, on contemporary English practice and critical attitudes, or of Ruben Dario and Luis Borges on the practice of their craft in Spain. Nor is anything of the sort yet in sight. I have perhaps wandered rather far from the book I have ...”

“... back of the Labour Government had been broken. Harold Wilson resigned, and begged his successor, James Callaghan, to carry out a full-scale investigation into what he felt had been the subversion of his office by the security services. Callaghan refused. Although Wilson continued with his allegations, the security services felt reprieved. Wright’s ...”

“... British political history, as Rab Butler shrewdly remarked in 1940, was not the ultra-respectable William Pitt – a pilot who in fact failed to weather the storm – but the raffish, unreliable Charles James Fox, another politician with no deep attachment to the social order. Certainly Churchill wanted to preserve ...”