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“... by Congress. But they have embraced the Supreme Court and its peculiar powers at least since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, a decision thought (wrongly: legislation was required) to have ended racial segregation in American schools. The court delivered liberals some victories: legal aid was guaranteed to people charged with crimes, the scope of ...”

“... Another soul saved from dilettantism, if I may put it thus. Leavis never put it thus. Some of Frederick Crews’s book The Pooh Perplex is parody, but this isn’t: it is a lampoon which supposes itself, not to be imitating Leavis’s style or form, but to be exposing his essential nature – and translating it into something recognisable to ...”

“... the ship to Gibraltar, where they hoped to claim salvage. Instead, they were met with suspicion: Frederick Solly Flood, the British attorney general for the colony, led an inquiry into possible foul play. The sailors were eventually acquitted, but rewarded with only a disappointing fraction of the value of the ship and its cargo. There’s plenty of foul ...”

“... beginning with the first non-stop transatlantic flight, made in 1919 by John Alcock and Arthur Brown. McCann reconstructs the perils of the journey, the freak weather and mechanical trouble, as well as the ‘genius and magic’ needed to see them through. The chapter is high on technical detail and period slang (plenty of Great Scotts and Tally-hos) but ...”

“... its behalf, there is scant reference to the lives of black people in Washington. An encounter with Frederick Douglass is noted as an example of Lincoln’s generosity: the President allowed him into the White House after his Inauguration despite an order banning all ‘people of colour’. The feelings, thoughts and responses of Charlotte Forten Grimke are ...”

“... Merlin and Elizabeth I suggested the culmination of Arthurian prophecy in the Hanoverian monarchy. Frederick Louis, Caroline’s unpopular son, and his wife Augusta attempted to rival this display, planning a Mount of Parnassus, a House of Confucius and a Physic Garden. But Frederick died in 1751, and the realisation of ...”

“... During​ the 1870s, the decade he turned fifty, Frederick Law Olmsted, the creative mastermind of New York’s Central Park, looked back on his career as a landscape architect, the compound profession he had virtually invented from elements of gardening, agriculture, architecture, landscape painting and civil engineering ...”

“... was fashioned by Cassius Clay and James Birney of Kentucky, the brilliant fugitive slave leaders Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Mark Twain, Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter and Martin Luther King Jr, to name just a few from the last two centuries. These figures are not to be found in The Southern Tradition, but Southern they were. Even if racism ...”

“... a long darkness. Chernobyl: A Novel is the first Western book-length fiction about the accident. Frederick Pohl, an elder statesman of Science Fiction, chanced to be in the Soviet Union, on his fifth visit, just after the explosion. The result was a narrative re-creation of the events of the days from 25 April to 23 May 1986, from the view-point of a select ...”

“... you while you are making a ludicrously maladroit attempt to swaddle a stolen painting in brown paper. Fly into a sulk. Bundle the poor girl into your car, and when she protests, silence her with a hammer, noting, as you do so, that its impact on her skull is like hitting clay or hard putty. (You are brilliantly obsessed by details.) Drive thirty ...”

“... get white middle-class males to behave better to the people they enjoy shoving around: black and brown people, women, poor people, recent immigrants, homosexuals. It hoped to encourage these groups to take pride in themselves, rather than accepting the derogatory descriptions which the white males had invented. By now, however, it has turned into an attempt ...”

“... Ross Perot called Lin an ‘egg roll’. She was compelled to defend her design before Congress. A Frederick Hart statue of three soldiers was erected next to her memorial to appease the literal-minded. ‘It’s like Maya Lin all over again. But worse,’ a character in The Submission is made to say, without much subtlety, after the winner of the blind ...”

“... own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll and remained heavily indebted to Little Richard. Bouncing around with Jenkins, who had ...”

“... never tired of slaughtering birds and animals. Baker was a daring, wealthy ‘sportsman’. Frederick Courtenay Selous, as DNB styles him (my hotel’s original begetter seems to have borrowed his middle name and misspelt it), was manifestly not an explorer. Kathryn Tidrick, in her admirable study, labels him an ‘adventurer’. He was a dedicated if ...”

“... well that ends well. Just what two/ Young gentlemen of Verona might any day do,’ as Frederick Clayton comments in a brilliant modern epilogue to the play. As with Shakespeare’s bed tricks, it’s hard to know how much we are supposed to worry about the rapes in Terence. On the one hand, they are a useful plot device. The victim can remain ...”