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“... pale mother nourishes her child to the deadly slaughter.’ So oppressive were the rich and great, Robert Crowley declared in 1550, that ‘we must needs fight it out, or else be brought to the like slavery that the Frenchmen are in!’ ‘European slavery is indeed a state of liberty, if compared with that which prevails in the other three divisions of the ...”

“... brought about the desired upsurge. An older generation of Marxists (led by the unvanquished E.P. Thompson) have counter-attacked with the ‘poverty of theory’ and continued to assert the validity of a traditional British socialist heritage going back at least to the 17th century. All this is given full play in Caute’s narrative. Richard Stern is a young ...”

“... There is, of course, a long tradition of eccentric locales in the history of detective fiction. Robert van Gulik wrote a series set in ancient imperial China; Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End is set in the Egypt of the pharaohs. However, these settings were clearly exceptions; and part of their appeal was their distance from paradigmatic locations ...”

“... are snitches. What did the local liquor store owner in Woody Creek, Colorado, know about Hunter Thompson? The make of his car and that he was going to appear on the Today show. The main snitch in Ray Bradbury’s file was the actor and screenwriter Martin Berkeley, a former Communist Party member who gave around 160 names to the House Committee on ...”

“... style means that you have something to hide. This implication is clear in such writings as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader over Your Shoulder, Herbert Read’s English Prose Style, and Orwell’s several essays on language and its consequences. Crick names four of these essays: ‘The Prevention of Literature’, ‘Writers and ...”

“... the law officers perhaps doubted whether the more serious charge would hold up. The trials of Robert Watt and David Downie, which revealed parallel plots for insurrection in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, set a more direct precedent. They were the first trials for high treason to take place in Scotland since the 1351 statute had become law there. The ...”

“... Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a hegemonic project like Modernism is getting under way. Frost’s reputation survived because, feigning simplicity, he appealed to the people, to ...”

“... and Dudley Nichols’s idea of making Thieves like Us was taken up by Nicholas Ray in 1948 and by Robert Altman in 1974. All these stories, of course, were originally novels written by someone else, but we do get a sense that in Hollywood this process is less like recycling and more like playing a jazz standard, done with a certain amount of respect, or a ...”

“... whom the term would have embraced at any later period, but one specific group – the followers of Robert Owen. Like Engels himself, Robert Owen was an unusual figure among the founding fathers of socialism in that he was also a successful capitalist entrepreneur. Born in 1771, the son of a humble Welsh saddler, Owen soared ...”

“... to the hyper-rational world. He didn’t pose as a guru like Ken Kesey, Carlos Castaneda or Robert Bly; nor did he adopt the unhinged expressionism of Hunter S. Thompson. He never wanted to build a movement, evangelise for drug use or found a school. Instead, he leaves space for scepticism and the possibility that ...”

“... Dracula; others are so familiar to folklorists that they are included in the international Aarne-Thompson index which lists frequently used motifs. Yet their central themes – especially the peculiar justice and injustice of the powerful and capricious, whether protecting or punishing the innocent – echo through the vast corpus of folk literature ...”

“... the sickliness of this has been recognised and condemned. It was one of the Leavisites – Denys Thompson, I believe – who put the boot in on the Essays of Elia; and this was one of the Leavisite demolition-jobs that truly cleared a space, and let the air in, for a more than academic public. John Gross, though he dutifully and unavoidably finds space for ...”

“... of its ‘long national tradition’. Sentimentally, he now recalls, they offended patriots (E.P. Thompson especially). ‘Intellectually, they disturbed canonical Marxist opinion, as transmitted from Capital. Politically, they nettled the Labourism of reformists and the ouvriérisme of revolutionaries.’ In the beginning, they recovered two sets of ...”

“... true to history. In Norfolk protesters muster at Wymondham, where their leader, the yeoman Robert Kett, decries illegal enclosures while declaring his loyalty to the Edwardian regime. ‘Christ’s blood, sir, we’ll open the Protector’s eyes to the true state of things,’ he promises Shardlake and his company, grimacing at their finery and soft ...”

“... speech about wars of national liberation. He ignored the wise advice of Llewellyn (‘Tommy’) Thompson, the US Ambassador in Moscow, and launched a counter-attack which publicly raised fears of a possible US nuclear first strike. That put Khrushchev in a vulnerable position in relation both to the Soviet military, which was always keen to expand, and to ...”