“... old ladies as well as (special contempt here) relatively fit joggers. His indictments of Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton have been among the glories of the prosecuting counsel’s art in recent years. Taking the global village as his courtroom, Hitchens asks us, the jury, to stare with wonder and loathing at these singular specimens ...”

“... In ‘Margaret Fuller Drowned’, a sonnet of the early 1970s, Robert Lowell, whose ancestor James Russell Lowell had been skewered by Fuller’s pen more than a century earlier, sums up what’s commonly known about Fuller. ‘You had everything to rattle the men who wrote,’ he begins, addressing her as ‘the first American woman?’ (emphasis on the question mark ...”

“... new ways to tax large concentrations of wealth, primarily by means of the share levy but also by a Henry George-style betterment levy, or a tax on increases in the value of commercial land. Of course there will be opposition, but there is also, as we have recently seen in many European capitals, great discontent at a failing pension system. At one time, income ...”

“... is difficult to understand when it does . . . Bad knowledge drove out good.’ The naval surgeon James Lind continued to advocate bleeding; he failed properly to anticipate the 20th-century randomised clinical trial; and, even when he did come to realise the important role of citrus in 1747, he ‘had no clear understanding of exactly what it was that he had ...”

“... in a world that suited his tastes and interests. He had married Louise Godon, daughter of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the connoisseur, gallery owner and dealer who championed many of the great artists of his day, including Picasso, Juan Gris and Braque. Leiris seemed to know everyone without having scurried from soirée to soirée: the dumbwaiter simply arrived ...”

“... a private prosecution against the magazine on a charge of blasphemous libel because of a poem by James Kirkup it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I ...”

“... great days under Anthony Sampson and Sylvester Stein – and the energetic assistant editor Henry Nxumalo, who was murdered on an investigative assignment – were coming to an end. Stein’s successor, Tom Hopkinson, was a more cautious editor, but Drum had assembled some of the best writers in the country, among them Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi ...”

“... Secret Harmonies). Powell was born in 1905 and died in 2000.Powell comments in the Notebook on ‘Henry James’s inability to invent good proper names’ – the inability may more properly belong to our culture, since James took a lot of his names straight from the Times – and certainly suffers from no such ...”

“... who is Hazlitt’s confidant Peter George Patmore; and three to ‘J.S.K. – ’, or James Sheridan Knowles, recounting the final, farcical agonies of the affair. But the printed Liber Amoris is not the only source. There is a manuscript copy of Part One with additions and emendations in Hazlitt’s hand. There are the uncensored originals of ...”

“... career of Alexandre Dumas, though England was not far behind with Harrison Ainsworth and G.P.R. James. It was at this point that the historical novel started to acquire its modern ambiguity. Most literary genres have included a variety of registers, and as the Russian Formalists always emphasised, their vitality has typically depended on interactions ...”

“... visit to London, where his portrait was painted by William Hilton. Taylor and his business partner James Hessey gave a dinner for him, at which Clare met and became friends with Henry Cary, whose translation of Dante he draws on in ‘To the Snipe’. A week after returning to Helpston, he married Patty Turner, who was ...”

“... sense. There is also the extra ‘e’ on Maud, the remarriageable reader of French novels in Henry James’s ‘The Story of It’: a quirk Oppen chose not to change in later editions. Yet the drift is clear and exhilarating, and there is a cold precision, no less exhilarating, in the way the poem gets where it’s going, in a single, almost ...”

“... the usual canon. It will disconcert some to find, after forty pages on problems associated with James Thomson’s long poem The Seasons, that they are to be elucidated via John Dyer’s more specialised verse treatise on sheep management, The Fleece. The essay on language centres on the views of Samuel Johnson, but the periphery takes more pages, and is ...”

“... possible for immigrant Europeans – first the Irish and then the Jews – to pass. Rogin quotes James Baldwin: ‘No one was white before he/she came to America.’ It is customary to derive American movies from the low comedy and ethnic knockabout of late 19th-century vaudeville, as well as the mishmash of spectacular attractions that characterised staged ...”

“... to mind, but the Napoleonic Penal Code made similar provision. During the Spanish Inquisition, as Henry Kamen writes, ‘there was no need to rely on a secret police system, because the population as a whole was encouraged to recognise the enemy within the gates.’ The tradition of denunciation as civic virtue was reinvented in the French Revolution, when ...”