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“... technology, revolutionising trade and naval warfare. The designer was the polymathic William Petty (1623-87) – mathematician, mechanic, physician, cartographer and statistician – and one of his prototypes was called the Experiment. The ship was an experiment in science, technology and entrepreneurship. No one had ever seen such a vessel; it ...”

“... Freud must be very unsettling to necessitate such cushions. Enright’s poem ‘Anecdote from William IV Street’ – about a request for the works of Freud and for an artwork of Jesus Christ – succeeds in its succinct ruefulness, the melting sentiment (as Eliot said of Goldsmith) just held in check by the precision of the language. But when telling us ...”

“... When William Laughton Lorimer, formerly Professor of Greek at St Andrews, died in 1967, he left behind him the manuscript of a translation of the New Testament into Scots, on which he had been working for the past ten years. A quarter of the translation was in more or less final form; the rest of it was in a revised first draft ...”

“... For Scotland, there has been work of major significance in the past decade by, for example, William Donaldson, Murray Pittock, Robert Crawford and Andrew Noble. More general studies of emergent nationalism must be relevant to Burns. For while he may not have been a consistent Jacobite or even what in British terms passed for a Jacobin, his attitude to ...”

“... our places at the dinner table at Salisbury Court in November 1583, ‘as in a late novel by Henry James’: ‘who had done what, who knew who had done what, and who knew who knew who had done what.’ Suspicion hung over the scene like a November fog, already a problem in Elizabethan London. (Those making a film of this book will want to know that.) The ...”

“... actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many ...”

“... as well as eloquent spokesmen on both sides of the slavery question, such as Stephen Douglas and William Seward. John Quincy Adams didn’t consider it beneath him to serve in the House after his term as president. Such men offer a sharp contrast to the smaller-than-life mediocrities who occupy seats today. But as Freeman points out, even peaceful ...”

“... Monday night till Friday morning. Opium and its effects here receive the jawgrinding judgment of James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a ...”

“... figures who recreated modern writing were gay, or Irish, or Jewish: Melville, Whitman, Hopkins, James, Yeats, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, Stein, Beckett, Mann, Proust, Gide, Firbank, Lorca, Cocteau, Auden, Forster, Cavafy. But he would have been slightly unsettled, I think, by the thought of the gay element in this list, and by the idea that in place of ...”

“... They have hung there since 1756, when the bishop of Durham acquired them from the estate of James Mendez, a Jewish merchant of Portuguese descent. Mendez bought them from William Chapman in 1720, just after the collapse of the South Sea Company, in which Chapman was a shareholder. How and when the paintings arrived in ...”

“... How different parliaments are in our day. In the cabinet, Lincoln’s chief supporter and guide is William Seward, his secretary of state, played with all kinds of grace and irony by David Strathairn; and in the House his opponent and ultimate ally is Thaddeus Stevens, a witty and domineering abolitionist, represented by an extraordinary black wig that has ...”

“... to have its volume revised and expanded by Yale.* The mid-18th-century country house designed by James Paine is described as ‘utilitarian’ but ‘counterbalanced with magnificent and ornate interiors’. It belonged to the Lamb family, forebears of Queen Victoria’s first prime minister, Lord Melbourne and was bought in the 1920s by a Liverpool ...”

“... In​ 1940, James Baldwin visited the painter Beauford Delaney at his studio on Greene Street. Baldwin was fifteen and a high school student; the meeting had been arranged by a friend. ‘Beauford was the first living, walking proof, for me, that a Black man could be an artist,’ Baldwin wrote later. In Delaney, a gay black artist from Knoxville, 23 years his senior and living downtown, rather than in Harlem, Baldwin saw a possible future for himself ...”

“... the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink. And there were the Americans. I remember James Fenton noticing how they would cluster a little closer together and talk in a fashion slightly more intense. Mainly Rhodes or Fulbright scholars, they had come from every state of the union with what amounted to a free pass. The Yanks of Oxford were ...”

“... in a very different spirit. The offensive title of this book is taken from a letter of Henry James. What right had James to patronise Hardy, and why should Salter think it worth repeating? Salter’s aim is admittedly to cut Hardy down to size – he thinks the reputation exaggerated, particularly that of the man of ...”