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“... cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes (1995) clarifies the pessimism of the first novel. John Breeze’s mother was ‘killed by lightning’, we learn, but we mustn’t suppose lightning can’t strike twice. John thinks of Wile E. Coyote, whose crackpot attempts to catch Road Runner always meet with ...”

“... career is rendered in print-out jargon: he is adopted into the Bennett family, goes to exclusive Williams College, distinguishes himself in the OSS during the war, rises to Deputy Assistant Director of the CIA, falls heir to the Bennett industrial empire and ends up ‘Master of Loon Lake’. Thus abstracted, Loon Lake can be seen to make the same grand ...”

“... of American talent was centred on London. Well, not all: Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (like Pound and his protégés, an early contributor to Poetry, Chicago) stayed behind; so did the group of young painters and photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly Camera Work. Besides, it was always possible ...”

“... into her new classroom, the children dive for cover under their desks, shrieking. Only one boy, John, stands firm, saying: ‘I ain’t afeared.’ The children are often hungry, unwashed, shivering in threadbare hand-me-downs, only able to express themselves through blows and screams and tears. This was shocking to Gilroy and her fellow immigrants from the ...”

“... has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but without either a social base or alternative policies – you who once knew the Labour Party as inherently a coalition? I think of my late and lamented friend, ...”

“... a charming woman who wrote wry nostalgic sketches to a major figure in Victorian studies. Raymond Williams jump-started this re-evaluation in 1958, when he described her first novel, Mary Barton, as ‘the most moving response in literature to the industrial suffering of the 1840s’. Although Williams went on to complain ...”

“... She translated texts from English, German and French, by authors including Eduard Mörike, John Donne, Simone Weil and Proust, writers whose style she admired. She also championed Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. She did some work for Italian radio and wrote a few prefaces, mostly for ...”

“... Royal Military Police. Despite this, detectives charged a member of the patrol, Private Michael Williams of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment, with murder. By the time of Williams’s trial, in 1977, the charge had been reduced to manslaughter. He was acquitted by a judge – sitting without a jury – who accepted his ...”

“... Montaigne, but was curiously silent about his many thefts from Burton. They were first spotted by John Ferriar, a Manchester physician, who in 1793 published a sympathetic but puzzled essay on Sterne’s indebtedness to the Anatomy: ‘I do not mean to treat him as a Plagiarist,’ he writes. ‘I wish to illustrate’ – to celebrate – ‘not to degrade ...”

“... In his Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), John Gabriel Stedman describes meeting a man who had been a prince in Africa but was ‘surprized, taken, and bound’ while on a raid ‘to revenge his [father’s] death’. Yet some who wrote about the plantations also correctively maintained that, whatever ...”

“... could project their own experience, identifications and desires for recognition’. Kate Williams explores another dimension of populism: the marketing of Nelson to women. The outpouring of Nelson jewellery and decorative memorabilia offered a patriotic equivalent to tricolour cockades. The affair with Emma Hamilton seems to have enhanced his appeal ...”

“... now, when they are so far behind in the opinion polls, they propose to recover by transforming John Major into a Europhobic John Bull. The other key to Conservative success was organisation. As Parliamentary reform acts expanded the electorate, the Conservatives recruited a mass membership in the constituencies. These ...”

“... unnamed amateurs (as ‘the loam from which great art can grow’, in the words of Ralph Vaughan Williams), only two (named) amateurs have been deemed worthy of representation in the show: John White Abbott, the remarkably faithful imitator of his teacher Francis Towne, and the Reverend William Gilpin, who merits such ...”

“... duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded off suspicion. But the real reason this triangular relationship endured unmolested was surely that, in some crucial sense, all three principals played by the ...”

“... When, in 1682, the Reverend Mr Busby, headmaster of Westminster School, expelled or suspended John Dryden’s son, the poet wrote him an excellent letter. Busby had already been at Westminster for more than forty years: he was that terrifying thing, a Great Headmaster. Moreover, Dryden had himself been among his pupils and knew well enough what tricks the old autocrat could get up to ...”