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“... trunked and bikinied masses. ‘Britannia Roused, or the Coalition Monsters Destroyed’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1784). In the election of October 1974, Wilson got a bare majority, with 319 seats, but still lacked a clear mandate. Yet the country, it turned out, was less divided than it appeared. In 1975 there was a referendum on continuing membership ...”

“... in our world. I didn’t find it in yesterday’s newspaper, though. The historian Marcel Thomas uses it in his remarkable book, published in 1989, on Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the man who was the spy that Alfred Dreyfus wasn’t. Thomas is thinking of Esterhazy’s acquittal in 1898. Why would a ...”

“... has withered and the sunshine faded. The death toll recorded by Roy Strong, Marcus Binney and John Harris in The Destruction of the English County House tops nine hundred, and few writers set contemporary novels in country houses as they did only a generation ago. One gratifying consequence is that it has finally become possible to view country houses with ...”

“... Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not freeing his slaves after he dies. His wife sings a nymphomaniacal song about him ‘fiddling’, which is ...”

“... 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four began to sell more than fifty thousand copies a day in the US, and in a Harris Poll 27 per cent of Americans claimed to have read it, though Rodden doubts the accuracy of the percentage. In Britain the sales during 1984 were 430,000, with Animal Farm not far behind. By the early Seventies the two books were selling nearly a million ...”

“... age of air power had been proclaimed many times before – by Giulio Douhet, Carl Schmitt, Arthur Harris, Norman Schwarzkopf – but Mearsheimer insisted that conventional armies would still form the basis of most conflicts in the 21st century. The ‘stopping power of water,’ as he called it, limited the capacity of a state to project power on another ...”

“... were not the ‘antics’ or ‘frivolous gestures’ that Manning labels them, and as Tim Harris has shown, they did not die out at the Civil War. In another revealing sentence, Manning declares that a simple enclosure riot was ‘hardly more than a skimmington, and thus a fairly primitive form of social protest’. This surely indicates a serious ...”

“... wetwith a decent happiness.Many of the poems bear the influence of the Elizabethan poet Thomas Campion, a favourite of Pound’s. Creeley learned from him how to employ irregular rhymes to surprising effect: ‘We both fell/I fell. You fell./In hell we will tell of it.’ He claimed to bemore influenced by Charley [sic] Parker, in my acts, than by ...”

“... that helped put the current US prison system in place.2 Last year Coates claimed that Melissa Harris-Perry, a Wake Forest University professor and host of a Sunday cable TV programme, was ‘the foremost public intellectual in America’, and when challenged on this by a white journalist called Dylan Byers, responded as if there was no possible ...”

“... an ambitious but clotted narrative, seemed strongly influenced by the Guyanese novels of Wilson Harris, whose hallucinatory, half-abstract, outrageously bejewelled manner is as dangerous in its idiosyncrasy as that of Hopkins or Dylan Thomas. Problems persisted into D’ Aguiar’s most recent collection, British Subjects ...”

“... narrative. She summons back into the annals of the wars the ‘taciturn’ figures the composer Thomas Haswell remembered on the Tyneside of his youth: ‘the sea-dogs of Camperdown, of the Nile, of Trafalgar … in every state of picturesque dismemberment – one arm, one leg, one arm and one leg, or a mere trunk with neither arms nor legs’. Uglow ...”

“... addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major credit for replacing Mary’s Thameside swamps with the patrician squares and terraces of Belgravia. Meanwhile John Nash, no foe to the rich, was erecting the haughty villas of Regent’s Park and designing a far finer Regent Street ...”

“... of the 1940s such as Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown and Wynonie Harris performed on what was called the ‘chitlin’ circuit’, clubs and dance halls across the rural South and in the black districts of northern and southern cities. Few whites listened to the music, and it certainly wasn’t played on white radio ...”

“... as this, named after his own town. Angus McInnes’s father had been a fisherman on the Isle of Harris; Angus had sailed with Forfar since early in the war, working as a lamp-trimmer. He was good pals with an assistant cook called James Wilson McGinlay, who was a bit younger. McGinlay’s father was a coachman at Milton, in Glasgow, a fact which eventually ...”

“... to read the poems. One anecdote that Parker does not pass on to us concerns a meeting with Frank Harris, in which Housman took offence at Harris’s suggestion that the final stanza of ‘1887’, the introductory poem of A Shropshire Lad, was darkly intended. The poem remembers the Silver Jubilee celebrations, and Housman ...”