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“... working mothers, female professionals, ‘family values’. The respectful attention given to Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve shows that they are anything but discredited among the so-called cultural élite. A spirited storyteller, May has uncovered a wealth of unfamiliar lore. We learn of black women slaves who refused to be ‘bred’ by their ...”

“... was arrested for participating in the Paris Commune, and in jail became friends with a musician, Charles de Sivry, whose mother – Antoinette-Flore Mauté – was a talented pianist and teacher who claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin’s (as it happened, she was also Verlaine’s mother-in-law). It was Madame Mauté who recognised Debussy’s exceptional ...”

“... speaker, is the masterpiece of such skewed vision: the ‘dreadful hollow behind the little wood’ with which it begins is the grandfather of all those marvellous Audenesque landscapes of ‘silted harbours, derelict works,/The strangled orchard or the silent comb’; and, just like the Audenesque, the Tennysonian manner created an imaginative world ...”

“... for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, who had sold five stories about Princes William and Harry in 2005 and 2006 for around £1000. The arrests of journalists began on 4 November 2011 with Jamie Pyatt, a prolific ...”

“... consort, Edith Swan-Neck, mother of his children. This piece, by the Anglo-German sculptor Charles Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by ...”

“... with cardboard and resoled them with cork or rope, made their own hats out of old newspapers and wood shavings, unravelled empty grain sacks so as to knit the scratchy yarn into underwear and socks, and stitched together new dresses from the good bits of worn-out ones. Eventually, they remade the uniforms of their slain husbands and sons into clothes for ...”

“... including (especially) the Kitchen Sink, jokes nipped from Oscar Wilde, Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood. He loved to do versions of his favourite songs by Twinkle and Cilla Black and even by brand new bands (like the Manchester outfit James) who barely had any fans yet. He so yearned to be his favourite movie star that he wrote a book called James Dean Is Not ...”

“... public recognition. By comparison, key framers of the Reconstruction Amendments – James Ashley, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens – are obscure. Unfamiliar, too, are the origins and back stories of their constitutional handiwork, which Foner ably describes.Throughout his career Foner has championed progressive radicalism in the American ...”

“... comedies turned on displacement or dislocation. The lovers of Athens find themselves in the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone move from the court into the Forest of Arden in As You Like It; Bassanio sets out from Venice to Belmont in his expensive, credit-fuelled wooing of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. In The ...”

“... built, garrulous man in his mid-sixties. A pupil at Gordonstoun at the same time as Prince Charles, cousin to a baronet with a large estate in Suffolk, he combines a confident, commanding air and the love of a good story with a peevish ability to articulate complaints in such a way that aligns his personal disadvantage with the disadvantage to the ...”

“... poets broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme in 1961, the prose versions by John Sinclair and Charles Singleton, and an admirable translation – again in prose – by Robert Durling, which will be published in this country by Oxford next year. Behind this we may perhaps see the influence of Eliot’s famous Dante essay of 1929 and of his own verse, which ...”

“... country that had taken in the refugee from Nazi Austria. Someone had to counter the flab and dead wood, and there was at that time no denunciation from within. Nevertheless, it’s possible to feel that the energy of aggression, the sheer blood-lust, was in excess of the necessary. There is a parallel with Leavis: an outsider (though native-born) equally ...”

“... eloquent speeches from the dock and those in the House of Commons by Burdett and Alderman Matthew Wood and Byron’s friend John Cam Hobhouse (all MPs elected from constituencies with a wide franchise), the machinations of the government were widely known. Richard Carlile, the editor of the Republican, concluded that ‘the ministers have been playing with ...”

“... was addressed was in little danger of becoming meaningless. ‘I’m very glad you like Alice,’ Charles Dodgson wrote to Margery Worthington in 1895, ‘but what wicked wicked sisters you have not to let you read it till they go to school! But perhaps the mistress had told them they had to learn a page of it by heart as a lesson?’ Dodgson is toasting the ...”

“... different treatments, the majority of which were tried on Alice, but most shared the view of Charles Taylor, Alice’s first doctor in New York, that the body should be stimulated and the mind soothed. From this it was only a short step to saying, as several neurologists did, that too much education was a bad thing for a woman. ‘For patience, for ...”