“... evil doers’. Leyland also became a partner in a bank jointly run by the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe, whom Melville singled out as ‘good and great’. Lawyer, art collector, botanist and public benefactor, Roscoe was elected MP for the city, after the usual round of bribery, in 1806, just in time to make himself unpopular by voting for ...”

“... with more critical praise than any other piece of fiction published in the US in 2009 (see James Wood’s review in the New Yorker, for one example among many). Many of Davis’s readers have tended to argue that her power is in the microscope she applies to her own life. In ‘Mrs D and Her Maids’, for example, Mrs D writes to a prospective maid ...”

“... Depending​ where you look, the William Burroughs centenary has either occasioned an outpouring of variously celebratory and carping prose, or a trickle of grudging acknowledgment in outlets thought to speak for the literary establishment. Writing on anything of passing public interest triggers an online avalanche of ad hominem posturing which quickly renders the original topic, whatever it was, numbingly opaque ...”

“... the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it).’ This internal dissent was a natural part of the Communist movement, in clear ...”

“... Forrester appeared in May 1864. ‘Forrester’ was a pseudonym – the author’s actual name was James Ware – chosen to capitalise on the fame of the Forrester brothers, former Bow Street Runners; Ware’s earlier police ‘casebooks’ under that name had led readers to speculate that the Forresters were the real authors. Ware’s heroine, Miss ...”

“... and of complaints kept at bay. Like the previous modern biographies by R. George Thomas (1985) and William Cooke (1970), but slightly more so, Wilson’s book is really the story, despite her equivocations, of Thomas’s despair; and then of the remarkable and brief late flowering and flaring of his poetry, with his untimely and now famous early death at Arras ...”

“... the Royal Navy was riddled with popery and that the Duke of York (Lord High Admiral and the future James II) had wasted public funds. A select committee was appointed to investigate. When his enemies won the general election in March, the duke fled. In his absence, Samuel Pepys, as secretary of the navy, was left to face the music. Pepys was found guilty of ...”

“... It is ‘better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the 4 per cent of convicts exonerated after execution are significant enough to justify sparing the other 96 per cent. It was Benjamin Franklin who said it was folly to trade ...”

“... Butler and Samuel Delany among others, is glimpsed at here. Bruce Sterling’s description of William Gibson’s cyberpunk aesthetic as combining ‘low life and high tech’ applies in the grocery store scene, with the boorish security guard, the racialised suspicions of the white shoppers and the recording iPhone. The video of Emira is rehashed and ...”

“... he would otherwise have been denied. Did Wedgwood’s childhood illness fire his ambition? William Gladstone thought it was the making of him, turning his mind ‘inward’. Other early biographers insisted that his success was due to innate genius, rather than an accident of birth or circumstance. Tristram Hunt steers clear of hagiography, arguing ...”

“... the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds ...”

“... woman he loved. Her ideas of their relationship counted for nothing against his will. Both Henry James and Choderlos de Laclos would have deeply admired the skill with which Lawrence exploited his apparent powerlessness in the face of three amoral but powerful and realistic women – Frau von Richthofen and her two daughters – scheming to give him his ...”

“... told, much less filmed, so perhaps it is worth restating the main lines. In 1787, Lieutenant William Bligh, RN, aged 33, was given the command of HM Armed Vessel Bounty of 215 tons and four four-pounder guns, a merchantman bought by the Navy Board and fitted up with the help of Sir Joseph Banks, who was then guiding Kew towards its glorious future, as a ...”

“... of making ‘daily life itself a dignity and a sufficiency’ was to some extent prefigured by William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, which, like The Maximus Poems, explores the historical layers and quotidian rituals of an average American town. Olson differs from Williams, however, in his emphasis on his own participation in the life of Gloucester. The ...”

“... the author follows the glow in the dark across the work of several novelists – Remarque, Mailer, William Styron, Hemingway – confirms this. ‘I have noted all the cigarettes that are crushed out, thrown away or unlit at night, shared and hoarded, detested and loved – instruments of torture and surgery, tokens of friendship and signs of love – in ...”