“... Glaswegian socialism into a laboratory of protest and policy, publishing the revolutionaries James Connolly and John Maclean as well as those, like Johnston himself and John Wheatley, who hoped socialism could come through parliamentary representation. Helen Crawfurd, Mary Barbour, Mary Laird and Agnes Dollan of the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association ...”

“... between Prufrock’s ‘overwhelming question’ (line 10) and the observation in Chapter 23 of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers that ‘The whole company were a good deal astounded with this overwhelming question’? Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English ...”

“... its own system of beadles and watchmen charged with maintaining order and apprehending miscreants. Henry Fielding’s Bow Street Runners, the first detective force, were introduced in 1749, and individuals could employ private thief-takers (often former thieves) to catch criminals and put them before a magistrate, but it took the success – and commercial ...”

“... and countrymen he was drawn to, not the least of whom was his future wife’s father, the essayist James Ashcroft Noble. Later on his friendship with other writers and editors, which Wilson vividly evokes, both inspired his own writing and gave him some sense of a shared project. His brief and passionate friendship with Frost was, among many other things, a ...”

“... on her arrival. In the summer of 1935, she met a charismatic and literary-minded soldier called James Reeves McCullers, Jr. They married when she was 20 and he was 24, and set up house in North Carolina. The detail that somehow sticks with you is that she wore knee-high socks to the wedding. At first glance, Carson and Reeves seem like the last people who ...”

“... the inexorable march of transnational capital.The Californian gold rush began in January 1848 when James Marshall, a US army veteran working at John Sutter’s sawmill on the American River, claimed to have pulled a gold nugget out of the millrace (other accounts credited the discovery to a colleague of Marshall’s called Indian Jim). Within a year tens of ...”

“... in politics. Political leaders became folk heroes, with nicknames like the Great Compromiser (Henry Clay), the Godlike Daniel (Daniel Webster), the Great Commoner (Bryan), the Plumed Knight (James G. Blaine) and, most popular of them all, Old Hickory (Jackson). The central event of Jackson’s eight years as president ...”

“... the Rosetta Stone for the British Museum. ‘The East offers an ambitious man a vast field,’ Henry Layard, then aged 25, remarked in 1842 after nearly three years knocking about with the tribes of south-west Persia. Layard caught the fancy of Stratford Canning, who had just started his first stint as ambassador to the Sublime Porte and sent Layard to ...”

“... witch-hunter, could no longer live with his public endorsement of Hoover and privily told his aide Henry Eakins that ‘Hoover is the most dangerous man in the United States. He has misused his office. There are things I know that Hoover has done to Congressmen and Senators, things that should never have happened. He has things on them.’ But this only ...”

“... of memoranda word by word. The platoon also has a section of biographers, with Robert Rhodes James, of C: A Study in Failure 1900-1939 and Lord Randolph Churchill, here present in a chatty round-up that is mere fluff; Paul Addison, who once worked with Randolph S. on editing the C papers, here useful on C and social reform; the navalist Richard ...”

“... likely to come when least expected. Unforgettable, in Volume One, is his message of condolence to Henry Rider Haggard on the death of his ten-year-old son: ‘to be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.’ Such a view does not prevent the joke he makes in congratulating another ...”

“... was in essence a heavy-breathing version of the noir fix on Los Angeles which began in 1934 with James M. Cain’s The postman always rings twice, surging through Chandler, Faulkner, film noir, the extraordinary novels of Chester Himes and on towards Rechy, Didion and Bret Easton Ellis. Davis acutely points out that noir – dystopian revulsion at the ...”

“... was he as miserable as he said? Cyril Connolly was there and he wasn’t miserable. Neither was Henry Longhurst. The evidence is conflicting. Shelden thinks that Mrs Wilkes, the headmaster’s formidable wife, ‘helped to shape’ Orwell’s ‘character, and he never entirely outgrew her influence, no matter how much he may have wanted to blot it ...”

“... and gentry, on the one hand, and exploratory thought, on the other, except perhaps in the court of Henry II of England, we need to look closely at the social setting. In a recent collection of essays, New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, Hugh Ouston produces work on the institutional changes brought about during and ...”

“... calls them) taken from the fiction of Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy and James. As usual her commentary is essayistically loose. But one is struck by how good a reader she is. She is at her best when most closely interacting with the text, intelligently ‘feeling’ the novel, as it were. In the Dickens chapter, she illuminates the ...”