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“... Haiti was to be ‘a thorn in the flesh of the slave order throughout the western hemisphere’. Alfred Hunt makes it clear, in Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America, that the prowess of Toussaint and his successors ‘did not go unnoticed by American slaves in the South’. In Louisiana, Haitian elements were potent in the black culture: drums and ...”

“... Alfred Lee Loomis was well connected. Some of his most valuable connections flowed from the accident of a fortunate birth. On his father’s side, the family came to New England only a few ships after the Mayflower, and Loomis’s father was a wealthy Gilded Age New York physician who combined fashion, philanthropy and philandering in ways that could have made him a character in a Henry James novel ...”

“... Labour anthem to replace the robust ‘Red Flag’, here we have it dusted down again by Tristram Hunt to front a passionate, kaleidoscopic but wilful defence of the Victorian city. Building Jerusalem is a book with a plain political line; yet where it leaves us is little clearer than in Blake’s poem. The subtitle offers the sharper clue to ...”

“... make and serial number of the rocket in question – in the mid-1980s with his first novel, The Hunt for Red October. The story of the Lithuanian captain of a Soviet submarine defecting to the West, taking his brand-new ship with him, was first published by the Naval Institute Press – ‘the semi-official mouthpiece’, in Clancy’s words, ‘of the US ...”

“... and Garters,’ and received the suave reply: ‘His Majesty will not trouble you, Mr Bridges.’) Alfred Austin had just passed away in that ill-omened year, having composed an ode celebrating the Jameson Raid and the well-known lines on the death of Edward VII. Along the electric wires the message came, He is no better, he is much the same. That at least ...”

“... to be written out of the record? So that the entry on Henty could be enlarged? To make space for Alfred Noyes? More seriously, Harvey’s commitment to American literature is not fully honoured, and the representation of Commonwealth writers and writing is very spotty. None of the following poets, all born before 1939, gets ...”

“... But there is also a sense of revelation. The feeling is captured in the breathless enthusiasm of Alfred Russel Wallace’s notebooks, here describing a butterfly: ‘I trembled with excitement as I saw it come majestically toward me & could hardly believe I had really obtained it till I had taken it out of my net & gazed upon its gorgeous wings.’ Wallace ...”

“... and scant healthcare. In 1928, with the pedal-powered radio receiver recently perfected by Alfred Traeger, Flynn set up a telegraph station and founded the Royal Flying Doctor Service. After his death, his ashes were buried here; a year later it was decided to mark the grave with a large boulder taken from a place known to European Australians as the ...”

“... and passing thoughts about her own life. In the first chapter, for example, María stands before Alfred de Dreux’s painting Deer Hunt, in which seven hounds surround a stag, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. She thinks it’s ‘fairly conventional’, but it strikes her nonetheless: ‘More than that: it unsettled ...”

“... and built a baronial castle on it where he brought up 12 children by two successive wives to hunt, shoot and fish. He sent the boys to Eton and acquired a collection of paintings, a house in Grosvenor Square and, in 1885, a baronetcy – after which he was known as ‘the Bart’. By this time the business empire was already beginning to decline, partly ...”

“... reading, Major could be presented as a drearier-than-either cross between James Stewart and J. Alfred Prufrock. He was prime minister by accident, or for-a-day. He’d won the premiership in a raffle, or had it laid on for him by Jim’ll Fix It. There was of course a brutal snobbishness in this approach, as there had been in all the sneers about Mrs ...”

“... when his 12 lines are measured against Lloyd George’s 92, nor even against the 11 given to Sir Alfred Mond, who must surely rate as one of the luckier entrants to come through the qualifying rounds in competition of this class. The scribblers and men of ideas do reasonably well, at least in the later period: Darwin but not Newton, for instance, W.T. Stead ...”

“... in pinning the murder on Sam Giancana, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Castro, Khrushchev, Howard Hunt, Earl Warren, George H.W. Bush, Duong Van Minh, the John Birch Society, the Freemasons or Aristotle Onassis. ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist,’ he begins. ‘I am a conspiracy empiricist.’ He wants to know the truth because without it ‘another ...”

“... Markeaton Hall. He had Wright paint him and five of his friends in the livery of the Markeaton Hunt – his father and five of his friends had sat to Devis 13 years before. Wright poses them casually. Harry Peckham stands with hand on hip; he was to die after breaking his neck while hunting. Nicholas Heath sits with his arm over the back of his chair; he ...”

“... and it was only in thinking about the experiences of that voyage that he became an evolutionist. Alfred Wallace differed in that he was an evolutionist (although he had not conceived the mechanism of natural selection) before he undertook his journeys to South America and Malaysia, but it was his experience as a naturalist in this country which made him an ...”