“... for authority. Ginsberg often claims to have issued indirectly from Whitman’s and directly from William Carlos Williams’s overcoat: but Williams’s presence of mind in language is quite different from Ginsberg’s, and his poems are far more fully composed. Most of Ginsberg’s poems document his time and collapse into it. They haven’t survived the ...”

“... shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... intimacy is at least worth speculating about. What, for example, is the truth of the legend that James Mill entrusted John Stuart’s political education to Place? Mr Miles does not touch on it. The story told in Iain McCalman’s Radical Underground is told perforce from the outside. There are no personal records to give an inner logic and life to the ...”

“... libertarian, Ayn Rand atheist – ‘a tiny contrapuntal campus movement’, in the words of James Mann in Rise of the Vulcans, whose members were as defiantly countercultural as hippies and peaceniks. Together, white Southern Democrats and self-confessed conservatives shaped the social agenda of conservative Republicanism. The aggressive certainties of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... God’s work in this life. Radkau and others suggest that Weber would also have been affected by William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which also appeared in 1902, not least by James’s suggestion that ‘the real core of the religious problem’ lies in a cry for help. The two men met in Boston in ...”

“... as sophisticated and as consistent in their styles, worldviews, personal ‘signatures’ as, say, William Faulkner – and thanks to Cahiers, few cinephiles would today think of disputing that. They were, however, less successful in their wager in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of modern French radicalism, that film criticism should be written ‘as ...”

“... 1972, five burglars were caught trying to plant a bug. The group comprised an electronics expert, James McCord, and four Cuban-Americans from Miami. It didn’t take the police and the FBI long to discover that McCord was the security co-ordinator for the Campaign to Re-Elect the President, known by its acronym – at once sinister and hapless – CREEP. The ...”

“... the former secretary of state, one of the begetters of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war; William Perry, the former US secretary of defence; James Mattis, Trump’s future first secretary of defence, who thought that Theranos blood tests would be a ‘game changer’ in battlefield medicine. Naturally, all those men ...”

“... that was nimble, intelligent and powerfully athletic. After riding a pirouetting Andalusian horse, William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle, reported that ‘I was so dizzy that I could hardly sit in the saddle.’ A ‘carrousel’ for Louis XIV, 1662 Pluvenal’s greatest refinement was the extravaganza of pomp that became known as the carrousel, a word ...”

“... construction. We are told that the Union failed to work because the then prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, did not create a ‘United Kingdom identity’ following the 1801 Act, and a policy of ‘inertia’ towards Ireland soon prevailed. The best attempts at incorporative policies, according to Townshend, were Catholic Emancipation in ...”

“... the self-regarding swagger of a militia officer stationed in an English provincial town. In 1816, James Silk Buckingham (a future MP) devotes the first few thousand words of his account to the complaint that he has not been treated as a gentleman by the English consul. In 1850, another naval tourist and future MP jokes about being ‘unable to procure ...”

“... a typical case. He entered office as something of a liberal, warning the LAPD’s tyrannical chief William Parker to ‘stop making remarks about minority groups’. But then he received either a package or a personal visit from Parker – accounts vary – and switched to backing the police chief and his officers for the rest of his mayoralty. Since the ...”