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“... around Milwaukee: they are traditional conservatives, supporters of Ryan and the governor, Scott Walker; 80 per cent of the women among them oppose Trump. Around Green Bay the population is largely descended from immigrants from the Benelux countries, including the highest percentage of ethnic Belgians in the US, and they are moderates who reliably ...”

“... themes. Mrs Fitzgerald used to be published by Duckworth, as were or are Caroline Blackwood, Alice Thomas Ellis and Beryl Bainbridge: all practise surprise and cultivate oddly-angled observation. There remains a certain strained resemblance between Fitzgerald and Bainbridge, though the latter is less elegant and altogether more wicked – I think because she ...”

“... books, the printer’s name and location could be disguised by the use of a false imprint.For Thomas Keymer in his beautifully detailed history, such strategies of evasion are one of the things that make seditious literary texts worth reading, forms of energetic ‘creativity and rhetorical complexity’ for which, perhaps counterintuitively, we have the ...”

“... and estimation, whether the message couldn’t have been delivered a little more crisply. Thomas Carlyle certainly thought so: the poem, he declared, was ‘all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and only wants forgetting’. It is not in fact that easy to tell the story in ten lines – Browning’s most concise ...”

“... the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the vicious pawns of a tyrannical king’. From the perspective of Westminster, the colonials were ungrateful rogue subjects who provoked needless border clashes that strained the Treasury, which had already been exhausted on their behalf in ...”

“... own work with actors. There are magnificent performances in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney Pollack – but there is never a trace of ensemble ...”

“... income, often felt they had to wait until they were better off. Some went ahead anyway. John Scott – a future lord chancellor, but in 1772 a 21-year-old Oxford student with vague plans to pursue a career in the church or at the bar – had no money to speak of and few prospects, and wasn’t at all the kind of son-in-law his sweetheart Elizabeth’s ...”

“... the river as the Globe. As narrative, this set-piece bears comparison with the best bits of Walter Scott and, as scholarship, persuasively demolishes the often retold fantasy version of the event, according to which the older playhouse is miraculously disassembled, carried to Southwark across London Bridge (or even, more romantically, on sleds across the ...”

“... are synonymous with being alive, which is not a viewpoint one can imagine Jane Austen or Walter Scott adopting. ‘I look at him,’ the narrator of Enright’s earlier novel The Gathering remarks of her husband, ‘a big, sexy streak of misery, with his face stuck in a glass of obscure Scotch, as he traces the watermark of failure that runs through his ...”

“... does it in the knowledge that she’s pretty serious herself. It’s April in Asheville, where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald once lived (Zelda died there, too, in a fire in a mental institution), and Joshua and Natalie leave the café and go back to their hotel room. Natalie has stopped drinking, but takes a swig anyway when Joshua passes her the bottle of ...”

“... have fought so savagely over its causes and consequences that in 2000 the academic Jonathan Scott observed that ‘the battlefields of the 17th century … are becoming increasingly hard to see under the great piles of bleached bones left by historians murdered by their colleagues.’ It might help if we knew where the original bodies were buried. In ...”

“... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...”

“... behaviour below. The star of that film, Keanu Reeves, also appears in The Matrix (1999) as Thomas Anderson, a.k.a. Neo, a company man turned hacker turned messiah. At the film’s conclusion, Neo phones in a proclamation of defiance from a booth on a busy street in the virtual world into which the bulk of the human species has been absorbed, before ...”

“... of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby estate in Teesdale, thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next came a beautiful lake at Killarney which turned out to be called the Meeting of the ...”

“... Lonsdale makes a point of the gratuitous nastiness of his attack on the impoverished Elizabeth Thomas, whose poetic name ‘Corinna’, bestowed by Dryden, is for ever defamed in ‘Curl’s Corinna’. Many women writers refer to the Dunciad, but this satiric epic, which cries out against the phenomenon of the very print culture that made Pope’s success ...”