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“... buildings erected by the first settlers, and allowed for the construction of a street grid. Six major hurricanes struck between 1776 and 1781, but the Great Louisiana Hurricane of 1812 was the worst of all, plunging the city under 15 feet of water. On Good Friday in 1788, a pious military treasurer lit fifty wax tapers in his house, and left them burning ...”

“... at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population: ‘A regional war ...”

“... not much cleverer than opera plots as told by emojis, but it is nice to think about, for instance, John Adams’s Harmonielehre as a long flight from a relentless rhythmic unison in E minor via a Wagnerian prism to an ecstatic combination of a grid and a wild and dangerous celebration of E flat major. Four years ago I wrote ...”

“... density of satirical allusion. He also admitted to missing the play of intertextuality in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a satire shot through with innuendo and obfuscation: ‘I did not understand that the Scene of Locket and Peachum’s quarrels was an imitation of one between Brutus and Cassius till I was told it.’ Nothing approached the ...”

“... in April 1984. His various drafts and notes have been ‘recovered and edited’ by his colleague, John Henry Jones. The result is often as maddeningly fragmentary as Faustus itself, and it is festooned with more footnotes than a redaction of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it has all the Empson hallmarks – the density of ideation, the abrasive wit, the marvellous ...”

“... they were after all withdrawal symptoms; by frustrating readers of their habitual fix – major happenings, well-marked characters, lots of scenery – she was alerting them to how deceitful she believed the conventions of the realist novel had become. By her abstractions she would be denying them the same illusory ‘solidity’ that is an object of ...”

“... and wife, to the Kremlin hospital. Bakhtin died in Moscow in 1975, aged 80. By that time his major works had been reprinted and it was starting to be realised what an original thinker he was. Through decades of terrible intellectual pettiness his ideas were in eclipse as much perhaps because they were too ambitious as because they were obviously ...”

“... a singing partnership with Chuck Mitchell, a 29-year-old university-educated American, ‘my first major exploiter, a complete asshole,’ she said, adding, ‘He liked my body, but he didn’t like my mind. He was always insulting me because he had the pride of the well-educated, which is frequently academic stupidity.’ Reader, she married him. Before their ...”

“... young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his own view of the Churchill he had known. He died suddenly in October 1987, having just completed the Foreword to the book now published. Robin Birkenhead had never ...”

“... dictated French foreign policy, while also finding time to shape political opinion. He was a major investor in the Courier de l’Europe, a periodical which reported House of Commons debates and informed Europe about Britain’s war thinking. This alarmed His Majesty’s Government but delighted Vergennes, who learned more from reading it than he did ...”

“... which it might not otherwise have roused. Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll (the murdered man). Sir John Henry (‘Jock’) Delves Broughton (the presumed murderer). Diana, Broughton’s second wife, who was later to become successively the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady Delamere (Tom’s ...”

“... volumes have ample but not crushingly exhaustive footnotage, with maps, a glossary, a list of the major personages who enter Pepys’s life, and relatively few (but always apposite) illustrations. One gets to live with the conventions almost as an extension of the diarist’s obsessive personality. The information is dispersed in a Pepysian pattern: there is ...”

“... it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived ...”

“... Civil War, mostly a much more accessible work, assumes that its readers will find the MP Sir John Culpepper’s remarks on monopolies in November 1640 ‘too well known to need quoting’. Any prospect of a rounded or balanced discussion of the ‘fall of the British monarchies’ is jettisoned by the decision to omit themes which have been or are being ...”

“... about what he wrote; this one is principally about what he did.’ Foster has had the benefit of John Kelly’s magnificent, though all too slowly emerging, edition of the correspondence, and has himself done herculean work in the archives. Among his chief sources is of course Yeats’s own ‘disingenuous’ prose masterpiece, the Autobiographies. For this ...”