“... from the eastern states, Hawaii and Chile. One of the people who travelled to California was Edward Hargraves, an Englishman who had spent time in Australia. Noting the similarities between the topography of California and that of New South Wales, he was convinced that Australia must have gold reserves too. In 1851 he unearthed gold outside ...”

“... and architecture’. You could arrange a story in the shape of an hourglass, as Forster said James had done in The Ambassadors, and triumph on your own terms, ‘but at what sacrifice!’ Following ‘the narrow path of aesthetic duty’, he wrote, ‘shuts the doors on life and leaves the novelist doing exercises, generally in the ...”

“... let you spend to save And save to spend, world without end, cradle to grave. Tessimond can’t be said to have developed as a poet in any clearly discernible way, and it’s not easy when reading his posthumously published poems to decide which is early, which middle and which late. All seem buoyed up by his wit and curiosity and compassion; this is ...”

“... funny and deeply serious, and it succeeds in being funny because it is serious. The same can be said of Orlando Furioso as a whole. If you come to the poem from classical epic, or Dante, or later Renaissance epic poets such as Tasso, Spenser or Milton, its playful or satirical aspects stand out. Ariosto’s first readers, though, saw his poem not as an ...”

“... in early childhood and not just with the onset of adolescence, as psychiatric manuals previously said of manic depression. As a result, the prevalence of paediatric bipolar disorder multiplied by a factor of 40 between 1994 and 2002. In August 2002, a cover of Time magazine read: ‘Young and Bipolar – Once called manic depression, the disorder afflicted ...”

“... however improbable, were all she had to hold onto. ‘I wonder where your father is,’ she said one day. With some awkwardness, I reminded her that he’d died four years earlier: ‘Oh no, I don’t think so. I think he’s off with some other woman.’ It was a way of bringing him back to life, and with him her familiar self – even if she could do ...”

“... Diatribes against intermarriage appeared, written by men such as the plantation owner Edward Long. This shouldn’t be taken as clear proof of widespread hostility to interracial couples. Their descendants also intermarried and assimilated; within a few generations, many identified as white. This explains, at least in part, the less visible black ...”

“... Chaucer served under three kings, honing his diplomatic skills in the last decades of Edward III, surviving the tumultuous reign of Richard II (1377-99), and gaining the favour of Henry IV before what must have been a rather sudden death in 1400. To contextualise his career, Turner provides an extensive political, social, economic and cultural ...”

“... metaphysical passage, a long poem every bit as wonderstruck and worshipful as John Dee and Edward Kelley when they scried their obsidian mirror, seeking to speak with angels. It begins, ‘Angels hovering all round,’ and then scatters, across nine pages, verses like fluttering cherubim, invocations to each of them:Heiglot,The angel of ...”

“... is an important, consciously Marxist strand of British postwar playwriting – from John Arden and Edward Bond in the Fifties and Sixties to John McGrath and Howard Brenton in the Seventies and Eighties – which has sought to renew and develop the Brecht project as a whole. But just as there is hardly a line of dialogue in the post-Caretaker British theatre ...”

“... wanted grand writing – one thinks of Parry’s ‘I was glad’, written for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 – there were composers good enough to provide it. There was a coming together from 1870 onwards of the music that was being written for Anglican services, the attitude of the authorities to it and the social standing of the composers ...”

“... police headquarters. ‘You can’t travel with books like this,’ the arresting officer said. It was less than three weeks after 9/11. He was told by another officer that he would probably be detained until at least after his flight had left.‘At this point,’ Ali writes in You Can’t Please All, his second volume of memoirs, ‘my patience ...”

“... uploaded Bradley Manning’s leaked data to a place where its subjects could read it, which is said to have played a role in the Arab Spring too. But the old, irreplaceable dance of democracy, which those digital media helped make happen, still took place between bodies in public. Indeed, the vitality of Occupy for its long season seemed in part to come ...”

“... of things, but yields only attenuated forms of evidence about the evolution of language.All this said, it is inarguable that language is an evolved feature of the human organism: the structure and functioning of the brain and of the soft and hard palates are proof enough. They will have developed in response to sustained, multifarious selection ...”

“... Holroyd has a lot of interesting things to say. Lee had a miraculous voice-training method and is said, though not very credibly, to have been one of the models for Du Maurier’s Svengali. He was a bit shady, a bit of a rogue – a type Shaw habitually fell for and habitually treated with great generosity. In conscious or unconscious emulation he liked to ...”