“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”

“... such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled off by Dr John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who persuaded investors across Ghana and the US that he was the sole beneficiary of a $27 billion trust fund hidden away in Swiss bank accounts by Kwame Nkrumah. He explained that as the former Ghanaian president’s closest confidant, he ...”

“... exhibition Mellor got in touch with her daughter, Boty Goodwin, who was then in her twenties. She took him to the family home in Kent and he saw a cache of her mother’s paintings, which transformed his ideas: ‘Suddenly the whole history of British Pop Art was different.’Well, yes and no. As Marc Kristal suggests in the introduction to his widely ...”

“... events occurred not dissimilar to those described.’ However it came about, Lees-Milne certainly took the secretarial course. After that, to his father’s annoyance, he was wangled by his mother into Magdalen College, Oxford. His Eton housemaster, who was married to a friend of Mrs Lees-Milne, had been persuaded to write assuring the college that her son ...”

“... on the telephone, that he will very soon have to ‘disappear’. The discovery of authors such as John Cowper Powys, about whom Vaes knows nothing, is paralleled in his reinvention of London districts such as Kensal Rise, Shadwell and Fulham. Remaining in Belgium, he finds another London with which he is comfortable: a ‘malleable’ capital with more appeal ...”

“... the letter ‘Shelagh Delaney’, the name by which she would be known from then on.Littlewood took both the play and the playwright on, inviting Delaney to live with her and her husband while they got the script into shape. Delaney knew how lucky she was. She had a gift for dialogue – ‘writing as people talk’, as she put it – but she knew little ...”

“... Court chief US prosecutor, Truman made it plain that there would be a trial even if Britain took no part. Nazi Germany having ceased to exist, delegations from the US, the USSR, Britain and France, the four powers that had set up military governments in the zones into which Germany had been divided, agreed in London on 8 August 1945 to establish an ...”

“... the early 1960s, right-wing insurgents – self-consciously using the model of Communist cells – took over the GOP, repudiated the moderation of its leaders, among them President Eisenhower and the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and built a formidable counter-establishment infrastructure that extended from local school boards to state capitols to ...”

“... But it is an unignorable backdrop to imperial history in late antiquity. That history took in much of Europe, the Near East and the Mediterranean in the fourth and earlier fifth century, and its narrative centre is usually the western empire, where Rome lay. Constantinople tends to become an onlooker, fuelling the suspicion that real Roman history ...”

“... more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did. The philosopher R.G. Collingwood, a close friend from their shared childhood in the Lake District, gave Ransome his entire life savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the ...”

“... that a firm, clear, shared language would show the way to a true socialism. And although each took a holistic view of language, neither showed any interest in a unified account of the world. All these philosophers, however, did assume that the point of language was to describe the world, however difficult or indeed impossible it might be to know that ...”

“... Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors (2017) tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the royal trumpeter; Edward Swarthye, the trusted upper servant of a leading Gloucestershire landowner; Cattelena, an independent Black ‘singlewoman’ living with her cow in the village of Almondsbury, near Bristol; Reasonable Blackman (or ...”

“... intellectuals included some famous names: Bryce, Courtney, Freeman, Lecky, Lowe, J.S. Mill, John Morley. A nervous concern about the consequences of mass franchise, worries about the concessionary mood of the Liberal leaders – especially in the face of violence in Ireland – led many Late Victorian Liberal intellectuals to drift rightwards toward ...”

“... Regular Army. Some UDR soldiers were also members of Loyalist paramilitary groups, however, and took part in a number of notorious sectarian killings. It is estimated that some two hundred members or ex-members of the regiment were convicted of criminal offences during its first ten years. At the centre of the debate about paramilitary collusion with the ...”

“... cases of heredity among the Cambridge men who were at the University about my own time.’ He took his BA in 1844; Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. It ‘made a marked epoch in my own mental development,’ wrote Galton years later. ‘Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a ...”