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“... delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about Shakespeare. In fact, Voltaire was perfectly ready to concede that Shakespeare was possessed of real genius, though of a rough and ready kind, but in denying that he had ‘so much as a ...”

“... of the Gabriele verdict that the word on the cloister is that the butler was a fall guy and ‘the crow is still ...”

“... refuges for time of war. Some things never change.Nine miles south-east of Falerii Novi – as the crow flies, or the badger digs; it’s nearly twice that distance by road – is the Bunker Soratte, built on Mussolini’s orders in 1937 as an air-raid shelter for the Italian army high command.* It’s in typical, bloated Fascist style, consisting of nearly ...”

“... the thousands of lynchings often advertised in advance as public entertainments; confined to Jim Crow schools, public accommodation, restaurants and hotels (where any were available at all); made involuntary participants in sterilisation and other medical experiments; and confronted with residential apartheid and job discrimination as they moved North. A ...”

“... again that chattel slavery was replaced ‘by subjugation enforced by law’ – that is, by Jim Crow. The South did not learn the lessons of its defeat by the North in 1865 as the Germans did of theirs by the Allies in 1945.If the ‘truth’ about the Civil War is still not established it isn’t for lack of effort by historians and teachers. Not since the ...”

“... Lewis Thomas’s latest book is a collection of 24 short essays of which the first has to do with the gravest problem confronting mankind – the Bomb. In this essay his fans see a different Lewis Thomas – angry where he was once urbane, grim rather than gay, for no aspect of the bomb is at all funny and upon this subject Thomas is unrelievedly grave ...”

“... only servants who reflect his melancholy by means of ‘a long face or a dismal name’: Raven, Crow, Skellet, Mattocks, Graves. When in need of a new footman, Glowry jumps at the opportunity to hire Diggory Deathshead. But Deathshead turns out to be ruddy-cheeked and cheerful, and is promptly fired. Peacock was personally a poor match for his ...”

“... Dreams is merely a poor version of the real thing.) The novel The Quarry resembles most is The Crow Road: in both books, a group of characters gather together, there’s a secret, there’s a missing or mysterious father figure, and there’s a lot of Banks-beloved drinking and dope smoking. The book also strikingly resembles two films, The Big Chill ...”

“... Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O’Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our ...”

“... a biographer. On the one hand, we have the 493 documented mentions of him brought together in the Crow and Olson Life Records, a body of paper which makes Chaucer far better evidenced as a person than Shakespeare two centuries later; on the other, there is the persistent refusal of these documents to see him as what we think we know he was (the major poet of ...”

“... research was done in order to establish this principle. Despite the introduction of Jim Crow laws in the South, there were no uniform criteria for what constituted a ‘negro’, or the more general category, a ‘coloured person’. Before emancipation in the Southern states, ‘negro’ had the fixed meaning ‘enslavable’, as opposed to Native ...”

“... a white mask, serving coffee to a white man without a mask at a lunch counter, a reminder that Jim Crow hasn’t so much died as been reconfigured. The message of such scenes was that whites had no reason to concern themselves with a ‘black plague’, except to make sure the help was taking precautions.The method of Floyd’s killing is no less ...”

“... that squats like a black hole, swallowing everything, in the middle of a sentence from ‘Solitary Crow’ (Rings on a Tree): Where he goes he carries, Since there’s no centre, what a centre is, And that is crow, the ragged self that’s his. ‘It was the place that it was in / And was in what the place was’ is how a ...”

“... urban labourers or his opposition to American imperialism.)Until recently, Democrats celebrated Thomas Jefferson as the party’s founder, though the author of the Declaration of Independence has fallen into disfavour because of his ownership of slaves. But as Kazin makes clear, the party of the early republic that elected Jefferson to two terms as ...”

“... his own small corner of the country, observing every detail with care and precision – ‘a crow with something pale and long in its beak lazily flaps up from having poked a hole in a green garbage bag’ – makes living in it somehow more tolerable. The implication is not quite that the unexamined life is not worth living, rather that an unexamined ...”