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“... is a set of philosophical meditations which belongs on the shelves next to, say, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. But Murray’s preface explains that ‘natives and some incomers habitually say “on” Bunyah rather than “at” or “in”.’These poems are mostly about the history of Bunyah, its inhabitants human and animal, and what it ...”

“... of time. The press was founded by a 26-year-old physician-poet from what was then Rhodesia called Stuart Montgomery, the author of a remarkable long poem entitled Circe, adapted loosely from the Odyssey and clearly influenced by Basil Bunting. If Fulcrum had achieved nothing else, the publication of Bunting’s long poem Briggflatts in 1966 and his Collected ...”

“... subject, colonial peoples fell and falls down on the fact that the inhabitants of the former had white skins. Because of this, even the most bigoted spectator in the past was usually sensitive to the claims of the different social gradations in these lands, as distinct from dismissing them as uniformly and racially retrograde. Thus while Boswell (not ...”

“... in a quite unprecedented way on their right to pass judgment on the deeds of important dead white males, and to tell and publish the story of the polities that they lived in. Bridget Hill neglects this broader intellectual context for a more narrowly biographical approach in this study of Catharine Macaulay, but hers is still a considerable achievement ...”

“... is no great exporter (France is without Marmite) and the ecologist is his brother, Teddy. Sam White, the Paris columnist of the Evening Standard, and a long-standing friend of Goldsmith, suggested to Richard Ingrams, as the heat died down, that the ‘services’ mistake was really a Wilson/Falkender joke. The ‘ecology’, according to ...”

“... Splendid​ specimens of the untrousered, strong-legged Celt’. That was what John Stuart Blackie, the founder of Scotland’s first chair of Celtic studies in 1882, liked to see about him in the Highlands. In Celts: Art and Identity (at the British Museum until 31 January, then at the National Museum of Scotland from 30 March until 25 September) he would have met several untrousered, strong-legged giants ...”

“... vulnerability of monarchy to this sort of abuse seems to have been the open secret of Tudor and Stuart public life. Every late 16th and early 17th-century writer knew in minute detail about the way favourites invariably managed to displace a prince’s real well-wishers, and by what sinful manoeuvres they clung on to their power, and how this exposed the ...”

“... A life history in which the stomach is wholly absent – you would never know whether John Stuart Mill ever yearned for sweets or felt his tummy rumble – doesn’t seem quite human. It is only in the past decade or so, however (M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas notwithstanding), that food has been making the transition from supporting role to chief ...”

“... The word​ ‘Caucasian’ was first used as a term for white people in the late 18th century, by men who believed they were making objective scientific judgments about the world. In 1795, the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor at Göttingen University who owned a prodigious collection of human skulls, proposed the existence of five ‘varieties’ of human, based partly on measurements of the head ...”

“... or that the Spanish would demand toleration of Catholicism in England to an extent to which Stuart Parliaments would never have assented. Gondomar remained convinced that the religious issue did not matter much because he believed the English people were all eager to return to Catholicism. Once Charles and his ever growing entourage were established in ...”

“... the story. A lad from Liverpool seized black rhythm and blues and transformed it. The sound that white America found too funky for its clean earlobes was re-synthesised by the Beatles and ricocheted out of Matthew Street and the Reeperbahn to recapture Teensville USA. J.W. Lennon, grammar-school dissident and art-school yobbo, used the idiom of rock and roll ...”

“... century encouraged flamboyant, complex carvings, which were then replaced towards the end of the Stuart period with simpler designs: stylised lions to symbolise power and aggression, or torso carvings of mythological or historical figures. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the production of warship heads for the navy was big business, supporting ...”

“... of the 17th century black slaves gradually replaced indentured servants, and indeed most of the white population. There were also some Indigenous slaves, mostly prisoners from ethnic wars, who were stereotyped by planters as wilful and lazy (English colonists thought the same of the Catholic Irish, but not the Scots, with their Calvinist work ethic). The ...”

“... daughter. So long as the little girl is ‘dressed as the princess’ – Frances has a ‘pair of white gloves for every outfit’ – Ivy can pretend to be a queen. This uncomfortable fantasy finds an echo in Diski’s memoir Skating to Antarctica, which reveals that even when ‘the money, the credit and my father all ran out for good,’ her mother was ...”

“... of poor black Jamaicans burned down the Morant Bay courthouse and killed 18 people, most of them white and one the local chief magistrate, who had just had them fired on by soldiers after a reading of the Riot Act. The governor of the island, Edward Eyre, on the advice of his military commander and his law officers, decreed martial law in the county where ...”