“... superb new edition of his correspondence, addressed to the 12-year-old Philip by his father, Sir Henry, urges him ‘to exercise that practise’ in letter writing, ‘for it will stand you in most steed in that profession of lyfe that you are borne to liue in.’ Some years later, when he was setting off on an extended tour of Europe, Philip was repeatedly ...”

“... the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades. The republic was governed by Southern presidents for 40 of ...”

“... was endorsed by most of George W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national ...”

“... British art dealer Asher Wertheimer. ‘Sargent has just completed another Jew,’ the historian Henry Adams told a friend when he saw it, ‘Wertheimer, a worse crucifixion than history tells us of.’Adams was one of the nastiest antisemites among the American upper classes, but he was not the only contemporary to regard the portrait of Wertheimer this ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unexplained hurry. Decades later, on a pilgrimage to Ferney, Voltaire’s retreat outside Geneva, James Boswell reported that he still spoke English in the argot of Covent Garden in its rakish heyday: ‘He swore bloodily, as was the fashion when he was in England.’Voltaire was a pen name, an assumed and performed identity. Born François-Marie Arouet in ...”

“... 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 ...”