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“... soon got a railway line to Boston. He tempted Carlyle to come and see the woodland he bought on Walden Pond by noting it was only two weeks from Cheyne Row by steamer and train. (Like many who hate London, Carlyle was reluctant to leave it and didn’t go.)Emerson knew that you can’t flee to the wilderness, because it is a human creation. The backwoods ...”

“... kindly. One famous proclamation (reproduced in Lawson’s book) was issued in 1830 by Governor George Arthur in comic-strip form, and showed, in its last frame, an Englishman being hanged for shooting a native (though there’s no evidence that I’ve seen that this ever happened). The problem was that Britain didn’t have the means to enforce ...”

“... moral reminders from Labour Party history. Benn’s father led the Liberal defection from Lloyd George in 1924, and stood up in Ramsay MacDonald’s ill-fated Cabinet to argue against dole cuts in 1931. Michael died as the brave new postwar world of the UN and the welfare state was taking shape. The diaries also record Benn’s obsessive love affair with ...”

“... the treasure of health’, which drew on the work of the 15th-century alchemists Thomas Norton and George Ripley, who in turn were indebted to the formulations of Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Majorcan polymath. The key to alchemy was deep reading, between texts and across the ages. Keynes’s scrabbling about for Newton’s papers was as nothing compared to the ...”

“... gawping out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries before George Young described the homeless as ‘the people you step over when you come out of the opera’, departing audiences were picking their way through prostitutes and cabbage leaves left over from the market. Shortly after Trafalgar Square was created in the ...”

“... Gaitskell; lists were drawn up of such notorious Communists or Communist sympathisers as Brian Walden, David Owen, Robert Mellish, John Stonehouse, Roy Hattersley and Reg Prentice; and even a bogus pamphlet on ‘revolutionary strategy’ for the installation of socialism in Britain was contrived for off-the-record briefing of American journalists, the ...”

“... after a wounded bird.’ The bird flew back to Amherst that autumn. The lesson of Thomas Eagleton, George McGovern’s running mate who dropped out of the 1972 election after it was reported that he’d undergone electroshock therapy, meant Wallace could forget about politics: ‘No one’s going to vote for someone who’s been in a nuthouse.’ He and ...”

“... economic matters could read his spirited attempts to convert Senator Bronson Cutting, Congressman George Tinkham and Senator William E. Borah to Poundian solutions to American policy issues: these were collected in volumes published in 1995, 1996 and 2001 respectively. His epistolary career began with this of 1895 to his mother, Isabel, who was visiting ...”