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“... and would-be presidential candidate – loved the campaign trail. ‘Watch me vaudeville ’em,’ he would say, as he climbed up to the speaker’s platform. He looked, as one reporter put it, like a ‘circus hitched to a tornado’, and his wild gesticulations were accompanied by merciless mockery of his opponents and generous helpings of common ...”

“... can’t alone explain. Many of us were enthralled by what the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has called ‘the Dionysian trap’. For the group of young black men that Patterson and his colleagues were studying, ‘it was almost like a drug,’ he writes, ‘hanging out on the street after school, shopping ...”

“... There’s a lot of this kind of bullshit in the novel. We know it’s bullshit, and Clinton and Patterson surely know it’s bullshit, and surely Duncan knows it’s bullshit – doesn’t he? So why is he pretending otherwise? Whom is he hoping to deceive? This is his interior monologue, not a speech to Congress. But it’s almost indistinguishable from ...”

“... than paranoid, less is left out and there are more loose ends. There’s also an explicit debt to Thomas Browne, and his inclusive curiosity. Threads made me think of Thomas Nashe and his pamphlet ‘Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe’, about Great Yarmouth and the ‘praise of the red herring’. It’s hard to write about Norfolk ...”

“... it. Translating this sentence in its context, in the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Ian Patterson has ‘the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.’ This is good because idiomatic, and it gets rid of the troubling plural. How many paradises could we bear to lose, and how many chances do we think we have? ‘Only’ seems a reasonable ...”

“... intellectuals. The latter were perhaps the most pious exponents of the ‘one nation’ ideal. Thomas Davis lived the spirit of the United exhortation to think ‘little of our ancestors, much of our posterity’. The finest of their many fine phrases, it was, sadly, among the vainest. The past resisted all efforts to subjugate it to the future. Reality ...”

“... plays, the factor which completed them and made them work: their original audience. Annabel Patterson’s Shakespeare and the Popular Voice boldly confronts this issue in a spirited study of the ways in which the plays might be said to give that audience a voice. Rejecting as ‘counter-intuitive’ the notion that Shakespeare would have supported an ...”

“... as their families and what music they like (‘My taste is eclectic, Anastasia, everything from Thomas Tallis to the Kings of Leon. It depends on my mood’). There’s a lot more of that than there is sex; Anastasia actually spends a large chunk of the first hundred pages wishing Christian would stop asking her questions and get on with it. But that’s ...”

“... Birmingham’s calculating ‘Bull’ Connor to Alabama’s incorrigible racist governor, John Patterson. But Arsenault is too good a historian to truck in the simple binaries of good versus evil – and particularly of non-violence versus violence. No dualism has shaped the history of the American civil rights movement more than civil rights v. black ...”

“... Marten could subvert protest at radical measures in the Commons by laughter, and friends like Thomas Chaloner and Thomas May shared his sceptical wit. To denounce them as libertines was to become a stock tactic for conservatives anxious to show where republicanism ended up; Aubrey himself disliked this tactic, and felt ...”

“... of rape of a white woman, and many more on the excuse of some supposed contact with one. ‘Thomas Miles, Sr … lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana for allegedly writing a note to a white woman’; ‘David Walker, his wife and five children lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a white ...”

“... the US, and elsewhere. A criminal conviction can reduce legal personhood – the voting rights of ex-cons are disputed to this day – and people in many other categories were and are routinely stripped of rights. Heller-Roazen refers to George Orwell, who in ‘How the Poor Die’ recounted his treatment as an indigent ‘specimen’ in a charity hospital in ...”

“... drinking itself to death. The ‘Roberts’ (Colquhoun and MacBryde) were there beside him; Dylan Thomas was boozing in the same pubs. Art is not made in that spirit any more. The notion that all things are a gamble, that candles should be burnt at both ends, that poverty is often art’s handmaid and scrounging talent’s privilege does not come to your mind ...”

“... leaving school he returns to London and discovers that Mr Harcombe, last seen living with Gloria Patterson, a young woman compounded equally of beauty, vulgarity and spite, has fallen on hard times. He has lost his healing gifts, is living alone in a Notting Hill basement, and working as an astrologer. Timothy goes to work once more as his father’s ...”

“... explicates Foucault’s employment of the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘genealogy’; Annabel Patterson no less helpfully provides a history of the Intention controversies from Beardsley and Wimsatt on, showing how, since the Copernican upheaval, the old question has acquired quite new contexts (‘Between them Foucault and Derrida give ...”