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“... of the day, a ‘dead rabbit’ meant a ‘very athletic, rowdy fellow’, and thanks to Daniel Cassidy of the New College of California we now know that this is an Anglicisation of the Irish phrase ‘dod raibead’, which has the same meaning. Along with sensational accounts of the Dead Rabbits’ exploits, the invented gang name outlasted the ...”

“... and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ingratiating themselves with China’s ...”

“... thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s. Some Orientalists have led exciting lives. V.J. Parry, an expert on ...”

“... to literary agents than that they are merely low and intrusive. In his Irving to Irving (1974), Charles Madison credits them with a major part of the responsibility for the present fallen state of the American publishing industry. (Madison’s book traces a completed cycle from Washington Irving, who helped his publisher with money in an emergency, to ...”

“... and bundles of parish records. Marsden is a fellow of Borlase, and of Sabine Baring-Gould and Charles Henderson in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, in his eagerness to find out about that extremity of England which has the largest concentration of standing stones in Britain. No serious theories have explained this, and it is daft to turn the ...”

“... Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised ...”

“... The subject of Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir is the decadence of American democracy. The conditions he began fighting in 1969 are much worse today and far more dangerous to many more people. Yet central casting could not have produced a more perfect foil for the American imperial Presidency than Ellsberg. An infantry lieutenant in the Marine Corps with genuine battle experience in Vietnam, a PhD in economics from Harvard, and a defence intellectual employed by the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, with the highest security clearances, Ellsberg is as good as the American system can produce in the way of a male citizen working in the foreign policy apparatus ...”

“... proposed digging trenches in the Sahara, filling them with kerosene and setting them ablaze. Charles Cros, a poet and inventor, petitioned the French government to fund the construction of a huge mirror capable of burning messages onto the Martian and Venusian deserts, while the will of Anne Goguet, a French socialite, left 100,000 francs to the ...”

“... names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the spiritualist subcultures that emerged in the wake of the war that cost Conan Doyle a son and a brother. Like other recent biographies, this one doesn’t mention the extraordinary case in which a sitter ...”

“... and Spenser, and then to Greville and to the ‘Spenserians’ of early Stuart England: Drayton, Daniel, the Fletchers, Browne and Wither. Against that tradition Ben Jonson is seen as leading a conservative reaction, to which in turn the young Milton responded by reasserting Spenserian values. The word ‘tradition’ is carefully used, for Norbrook knows ...”

“... a Bolshevik event and had Maclean been Lenin they might have got one. Crawford makes good use of Daniel Frazer’s 1885 The Story of the Making of Buchanan Street (whose shops the visiting Nathaniel Hawthorne considered to be better than London’s) but he could have dug deeper into the lives of the street-sellers, or found the stories of those small Glasgow ...”

“... extinction became indisputable, it attracted a particular kind of Victorian sentimentality. In Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), the chimney-sweep Tom meets the last great auk, a ‘very grand old lady’ sitting on ‘Allalonestone’ who tells the story of their extinction before weeping tears of pure oil. It’s revealing – if not ...”

“... Bohemia could well have become the focus for some of the aspirations centred on Prince Henry, yet Charles could not. How far Charles, like Harold Wilson, was handicapped by a ‘lost leader’ myth around him is a question to which the answer is not obvious, but one well worth further thought. Derek Hirst is facing a ...”

“... that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation’; in 1912, Major Leonard Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son, jubilantly launched a campaign for eugenic legislation designed ‘to stamp out feeble-mindedness from future generations’; and in 1919, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was keen to articulate her mission in eugenic ...”

“... to the Crown and its courtiers, ‘projectors’ also gained political cover. In the run up to Charles III’s coronation, the Guardian flourished its discovery of a document recording Edward Colston’s grant to William III of shares in the Royal African Company, which shipped more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an ...”