“... changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes begin to see universal manhood suffrage, equal representation for all ...”

“... just nine months, since the all-consuming public issue in the United States was the impeachment of Donald Trump. The trial was a giant anticlimax, of course, its proceedings lacking witnesses, its outcome predetermined. That Trump remains in the White House reminds us that there is almost no way of unseating an American president, even one manifestly unfit for ...”

“... one of nine children; his father ran a livestock farm. As a young man, he was variously described, Thomas Patterson writes, as ‘disputatious, officious, bossy, ornery, curious, energetic, impudent, eager, smart, a show-off, contemptuous of rules’ and, generally, as a ‘pesterance’. After working as a travelling salesman, Long went to college, obtained a ...”

“... The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall ...”

“... Kirkup, one gets the impression, is a man who’s seen it all. He’s seen Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean have a drunken row, Quentin Crisp mincing the streets, Dylan Thomas in an alcoholic stupor reciting poetry in a loud voice, and much else. Including, perhaps, Wittgenstein cruising for rough trade? Surely, one ...”

“... in the agora. By Plutarch’s time, Boeotia was a provincial backwater. He ‘breathed history’, Donald Russell wrote in his 1972 study; he grasped ‘not only the splendour of it but the misery’. His wealthy, well-positioned family provided him with the finest education – in Greek rhetoric, literature and history – and gave him the opportunity to ...”

“... had yet more vast machineries at their disposal. It’s no surprise, as Plotnick points out, that Donald Trump should so obviously relish the role of digital commander. In January this year, playing dicks on the table with Kim Jong-un, Trump at one point tweeted that he, too, had a nuclear button, ‘but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and ...”

“... the genre demands it. The Modern American Novel is an ‘Opus Book’ (General Editors – Keith Thomas, Alan Ryan, Peter Medawar) intended for students. The Literature of the United States is a volume in the Macmillan History of Literature. But no Oxford undergraduate could get by with generalities like this aperçu of Professor Walker’s: ‘Jewish novels ...”

“... of the time, before pharaohs and pyramids, when everything was still to come’: the Miami-born Donald Justice found the passage in Henry James for me at the beginning of my time here. ‘Saigon, 1969,’ my friend Larry Joseph said, when I sat him in Leonardo’s coffee bar a block away from campus. ‘Fucking Yucatan,’ I called it, not dismissively but ...”

“... for the material culture of classical antiquity, which Wedgwood and his business partner, Thomas Bentley, expertly harnessed. Turning away from the more flamboyantly decorated styles in which he had previously worked, including teapots in the shape of cauliflowers, Wedgwood began to emulate ancient vases, cameos and sarcophagi. He raided ...”

“... Well: the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898). ‘It is difficult,’ he went on, ‘to let people who think I have made a fresh start know that to indulge in rhymes was my original weakness, & the prose only an afterthought ...”

“... press; and of Hovis, Peak Freans and Huntley and Palmers. When Edward VII went to sea with Sir Thomas Lipton, it was noted with surprise that the King ‘had gone yachting with his grocer’; when the first J.J. Sainsbury died, his last words were, reputedly: ‘Keep the shops well lit.’ ‘To be conscious of our forefathers as they really were and, bit ...”

“... the Egyptian authorities have made the fight against smuggling and trafficking their priority,’ Donald Tusk said. ‘As a result there have been no irregular departures from Egypt to Europe this year.’ For Brussels, Sisi’s waxing authoritarianism appears a small price to pay for his perfect record in policing migration in a country with rampant ...”

“... it still takes what Hegel described as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The ...”

“... great powers for good they could exercise for the benefit of large numbers of people. Why else did Donald Macnabb, a district officer in the Punjab, build an irrigation canal with his own money? Why else did officials work in the famine and plague camps, burying corpses after the sweepers had fled, losing their health and sometimes their lives in an attempt to ...”