“... 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 ...”

“... Wordsworth, Johnston suggested, had been sent to Hamburg to warn the British minister there, Sir James Craufurd, of De Leutre’s activities. Much circumstantial detail was recruited to support this speculation. The story reached the newspapers and Wordsworthians could only answer that they felt in their bones that this was all very unlikely. In a ...”

“... only once more in the Hebrew Bible, to describe Moses’s rush basket (translated in the King James Version as the ‘ark of bulrushes’). Origen had imagined a square pyramid floating on a raft, but Hugh understood that such a structure would capsize immediately. He gave the ark a hull, then placed a sloped roof on the top and a door and window at the ...”

“... Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose ...”

“... till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of what might seem like odd affinity. Lee Strasberg’s ...”

“... permanently fixed. (His account of the countess’s funeral, attended by a small group including Henry Kissinger, is one of the finest pieces of writing in the book.) Even his remarks on Brandt end by describing what he would write ten years later and a quote from what he actually did write in 1971. Stern is occasionally aware of how time has frozen over as ...”

“... Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ‘Machiavel’ was the stock tag for a personification of evil. In Henry VI Part III, Gloucester vows proleptically to ‘set the murderous Machiavel to school’. In the prologue to the Jew of Malta, ‘Machevill’ boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens ...”

“... was, incidentally, a big Tarka the Otter fan, and once characterised the Oswald Mosley-loving Henry Williamson as a Devonian shaman, ‘a North American Indian sage among Englishmen’.) The man leaves behind a notebook full of poems, which the girls take to the local priest. These poems, which make up the epilogue to Gaudete, turn out to have been ...”

“... Jasper Heywood, was briefly the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. In 1593 Donne’s brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a priest, and died of the plague in prison; the priest was hanged, drawn and quartered. We don’t know when Donne converted, or why. On Donne’s own account, he made his decision only after he had ‘to the measure of my poore ...”

“... debate.*Johnson, the group agreed, needed a simple message that the public could get behind. Henry de Zoete, a former digital director at Vote Leave and successful Dragon’s Den contestant, suggested advising people to stay at home. Guerin, a New Zealander, noted that ‘stay home, save lives’ had worked well in other parts of the world. Cain proposed ...”

“... of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation during intercourse.’ This suggests the intercourse might be less than fervent, my name in itself something of a detumescent.28 April. The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should ...”

“... whether the prince had successfully slept with Catherine, there would have been no marriage for Henry VIII, thus no divorce and no Reformation.29 May, Yorkshire. I’ve lost count of the number of times on TV I’ve seen the sequence whereby a dead lamb is skinned and the skin fitted onto an orphaned lamb which is then foisted on a bereaved sheep which is ...”

“... personally assured him that he continued to enjoy royal support – an important assurance, since Henry II reversed many of the policies of Francis I within minutes of the latter’s death. Rabelais could go on jesting at tyrants and ignorant monks, championing Evangelical attitudes, defending oppressed Evangelicals from the deadly interests of the ...”

“... became a guide and friend to many enlightened, doubtful readers. It was because of the Elegy that James Boswell would, at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the ...”