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“... from different points on the Marxist-communist-anarcho-syndicalist spectrum – Callum Cant and Matthew Lee, Edd Mustill – want to draw lessons and inspiration from the strike. Their books focus mainly on the unions, taking it for granted that the establishment wanted to dominate the working classes. Studies by two academics, David Torrance and ...”

“... Robert Edward Lee​ was, in the universal judgment of his contemporaries, a beautiful man. Few Civil War generals inspired such commentary: ‘He stands fully six feet one inch in height,’ a New York Herald reporter wrote, ‘and weighs something over two hundred pounds, without being burdened with a pound of superfluous flesh ...”

“... Stephen noted), but with the help of his indefatigable assistant and eventual successor, Sidney Lee, the ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no ...”

“... There were big and tidy back gardens, on hot Saturdays, ringing with the amplified chuckle of Dave Lee Travis. I was 12 or 13. I’d stay in the car when my parents went to the garden centre, trying to get a better reception on my portable radio. At that time the station had more than twenty million listeners. The London pirate stations did not reach the ...”

“... young prince reappear in Moore as Elvis, Charlie Chaplin, Dylan Thomas, Louis Armstrong, Brenda Lee or Spike Milligan. It’s now the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, Biafra, Mosley and the fashionable dramas of ‘Kitchen-Sink Sade-Marats’ whose atrocious crimes fail to turn the green waters of Lethe lying stagnantly in the prince’s veins back into ...”

“... underlying violence.’ The authors of The Bestseller Code (Allen Lane, £20), Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers, are both literary computer people: Archer worked for Penguin, did an English PhD at Stanford and then went to work for Apple; Jockers is the cofounder of Stanford’s ‘Literary Lab’ in Silicon Valley. They have built Lotaria’s machine. It ...”

“... endorses, the outcome is a bit of a let-down, for he turns out – hang onto your hats – to be Matthew Arnold. ‘The 19th-century critic denounced the culture of his day in the name of something better, a more thoughtful and graceful culture,’ Jacoby approvingly notes. ‘Today most observers and scholars reject this as naive and élitist. In ...”

“... the abandoned shell of Fort Point in San Francisco, this fierce and frightened man, looking like Lee Marvin. The fat parcel of money he has been demanding throughout the film is at his feet. All he has to do is pick it up. Instead, he fades into the darkness. What kind of movie is Point Blank? And what kind of book is this, written by the man who made it?It ...”

“... she further and less continuously laments that it is too often not done at all. Hermione Lee proposes the example of Virginia Woolf, who hadn’t much time for either dons or literary journalists. She believed that ‘one should try to read books as if one were writing them,’ and advised an audience of Cambridge undergraduates thus: ‘Do not begin ...”

“... talking about Know Your Customer checks. ‘We take compliance very seriously,’ he assured me.Lee, an IT contractor from Kent, had taken the day off work to come to his first party conference. He had been out the night before, drinking with a right-wing vlogger he had met online. The former prime-time comedian Jim Davidson was at the same bar. ‘Reform ...”

“... the same. A very short piece called ‘Job History’ charts the unlucky lives of Leeland and Lori Lee, a decent, ordinary couple who endure a series of setbacks and disappointments from bankruptcy to cancer. Nearly as unlucky – though more fortunate than several of his neighbours – is Car Scrope, the dissolute protagonist of ‘Pair a Spurs’, who lives ...”

“... invented for itself’ and Chief Justice Denman’s as ‘the silliest thing in England’. Sir Matthew Hale, the great chief justice of the mid-17th century, refused to wear one when the fashion came in, and Scottish judges wore ordinary clothes until James VI, newly besotted with England, decided that gowns would be ‘comilie’. Nobody so far as I know ...”

“... less than two years ago. The best recent descriptions of Iraqi society have been by journalists. Matthew McAllester of Newsday has assembled a remarkable range of informants and illuminates issues from unexpected angles. Uncovering a mass grave, he is able to provide biographies of the corpses, witnesses who were present at their shooting and photographs ...”

“... months previously. But nothing except sheer obduracy can explain the blind faith of the captain in Matthew Hayden, whatever his rearguard efforts at the Oval. He was for a long time the world’s most destructive and bullying batsman, yet one who has given the impression for the best part of a year that he would no longer know how to bully his way out of a ...”

“... broad canvas, populated by a fascinating array of characters. Mythic figures (Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Jackson), seen afresh, acquire sharper outlines. Second-tier players have their moment in the limelight: the secretary of state William Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and ...”