“... Irish history has, however, come from post-Althusserian scholars like Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson,* and their work on the class dynamics of Unionism, as well as the nature of Southern nationalism, leads to very different conclusions: Struggles over the status of the North are no more automatically anti-imperialist than crimes against property ...”

“... influencing Marx’s and Engels’s ideas in various ways. By far the most important was Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, published in 1877. Morgan’s general evolutionary conception was in some respects strikingly similar to the historical materialism of the German Ideology. And it contained one specific feature which attracted Marx’s and ...”

“... that was looted, sold, hidden or damaged in the course of the war. Men such as George Stout and James Rorimer had to deal not only with the indifference to art of the Allied officers, and the antagonism and bloody-mindedness of the Germans: there were the practical and logistical problems of working in the heat and chaos of battle. There were heroes on the ...”

“... There is a notable difference between Hollywood and Forty-Second Street, however, Hollywood, like Henry Ford, conquered the world by mass production: in this instance, of dreams. Its fundamental concern was with the greatest happiness of the greatest number, as measured by box-office returns. The musical analogue of Hollywood has, of course, been profoundly ...”

“... and cure the mad – is a story of disappointed hopes, summed up in the therapeutic nihilism of Henry Maudsley at the end of the century. The doctor who had spent his life ministering to diseased minds, he wrote, might wonder ‘whether, notwithstanding impassioned aims, paeans of progress, endless pageants of self-illusions’, humanity’s ‘capacity of ...”

“... independence, generosity of spirit are attributes not confined to the polite classes. (It was Henry Mackenzie who captured Burns’s significance for the age of revolutions, with his adjective ‘Heaven-taught’.) There were, all the same, limitations the ploughman-poet would have to transcend – which in effect required him to write other kinds of ...”

“... Angeles in 1870. This was the year Bret Harte wrote his ballad, ‘Plain Language from Truthful James’, about two white miners who set out to fleece the simple-seeming Ah Sin in a card-game and found him to be their superior in the art of cheating. The poem was immensely successful, its irony largely missed, and Harte tried to rectify matters with ...”

“... forgers were more sophisticated, though less celebrated, than those with which William Henry Ireland in the previous century had deceived James Boswell and many others, though not the great Shakespearean Edmond Malone (himself guilty of tampering with manuscripts). The men of this new age were scholars, working ...”

“... and Samuel Joseph, while their sisters Emma and Kate Joseph married Sarah’s brothers Joseph and Henry Gluckstein. (The family tree is very helpful at this point.) Moreover, this interlocking, involuted, inter-married nexus operated not just as a cousinhood but as a cartel, with a financial pooling of resources known as the Fund. Such arrangements ...”

“... that the Cold War might end in chaos and local conflicts. At the start of the year, Bush had sent Henry Kissinger (codenamed ‘Kitty’) to Moscow on a secret mission to make contact with Gorbachev. Kissinger, going far beyond his brief, suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union set up a joint superpower condominium over Europe: ‘Let us make an ...”

“... American of no known address, is possibly the most accomplished writer of prose in English since James Joyce. This is not to say that he is also the best novelist, whatever that would mean, but that sentence by sentence he can do more than any novelist of this century with the resources of the English-American language and with the various media by which it ...”

“... themselves within a political heritage usually misrepresent their forbears: the Spenserians of James I’s reign, and Milton after them, re-cast Spenser in their own image. The process Norbrook describes, of adaptation within continuity, runs parallel to, and seems largely to have been created by, the tradition which has been located by Simon Adams in the ...”

“... increase its standing. The Founding Fathers – including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton – enjoy widespread, if superficial, public recognition. By comparison, key framers of the Reconstruction Amendments – James Ashley, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens ...”

“... the ‘survivor’ bit. The last poet left standing in the saloon. (Think Gregory Peck in Henry King’s The Gunfighter. Grave moustache succumbing to gravity.) Many myths surround the man, among enthusiasts, cultists and close readers, and this has always been one of them: Raworth is unwell but never incapacitated. The moustache may be a little ...”

“... 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 ...”