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“... govern its course. There are abolitionists, missionaries, political leaders (Eyre, Joseph Sturge, William Morgan and John Angell James); major cultural figures such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, all of whom took part in the public debate about the events in Jamaica; as well as ...”

“... before the American Revolution and a leading member of the Clapham Sect (other members included William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, who orchestrated the British campaign against the slave trade). Sharp was a bundle of energy and full of contradictions. He pestered the powerful to address the difficulties facing London’s black population, but also ...”

“... be typical of the middlebrow culture whose laureate was Longfellow and whose critical arbiter was James Russell Lowell, and from which Melville, unlike Henry James or Whitman, could not escape. Melville’s doomed attempt, in the late 1840s, to make himself into a country squire at Arrowhead, his farm in the ...”

“... it all merely about privatisation, the aspirational classes and crime it would be much easier: James Purnell could continue to privatise everything and Jack Straw to build dozens of gigantic prisons. That at least has coherence. But the Labour Party has a history and an institutional memory, even to those who seem most oblivious of it. The fact is that ...”

“... January Before’. In January, Protestant Mungo becomes involved with a young Catholic called James. In May, he is entrusted by his mother to the care of a couple of men she met at Alcoholics Anonymous, who undertake to show him the wild beauty of Scotland, and to teach him to fish. If this novel was your only source of information you would assume that ...”

“... 19th century by Edward Watkin of the Southeastern Railway Company and his partner and engineer, William Low. Despite the success of the great Alpine tunnels – Saint-Gotthard, Simplon, Mont Cenis – it is doubtful that Watkin and Low could have succeeded with their project of tunnelling under sea over such a distance, given the technology and the ...”

“... compendious alibis put forward in extenuation of Eden by his faithful biographer, Robert Rhodes James. Why, then, by 1951, had Lloyd risen so high in the Conservative Party, to which he had only finally committed himself as late as 1944? One explanation is that he had a good war behind him. He was one of the ‘Tory Brigadiers’ elected in 1945, at a time ...”

“... to combine a large territory with political stability seems to have caught the attention of James Madison, who offered a parallel vision in the tenth Federalist paper, thereby fulfilling Hume’s hope that ‘in some future age, an opportunity might be afforded of reducing the theory to practice ... in some distant part of the world.’ That was not a ...”

“... of 1797 eventually granted Scotland this school of virtue and Ferguson promptly enrolled his son James (b. 1778) in the ballot as an ‘Example to my neighbour Farmers’; though ‘if College call him away I trust that money will procure a Substitute.’ Today it is the Scots alone who detect otherness in the Scottish Enlightenment, and find it ...”

“... Neal Bowers has published three collections of poetry and two critical books, one on the works of James Dickey and one on Theodore Roethke. For the past twenty years he has occupied a creative writing post at Iowa State University, and, until 1992, led what he describes as ‘a most uneventful life’ in the small town of Ames, Iowa. The majority of poets, he ...”

“... What could he better: six hundred pages of other men’s flowers, offering relief from what Henry James is supposed on his death-bed to have attributed his wearing-out to – ‘the labour of discrimination’? But the recent profusion does leave room to reflect that some anthologies are better than other anthologies, and that some subjects are better suited ...”

“... has something in common here with The Little Girls, or The Death of the Heart, as well as with William Trevor’s The Old Boys. Naturally enough, all three distinguished novelists contrive to keep the subject clear of the standard treatment given it by afternoon plays on the BBC (‘Stephanie has come back in middle age to the town where fate once dealt ...”

“... the Spanish Ambassador Sarmiento’s successful protection of troublesome recusants under James I – and handles it frivolously. Finally, Mortimer Levine contrives to sink a self-evident truth – that women usually took the back seat in Tudor government – by refusing to admit that there were exceptions, such as Anne Boleyn. Anything but ...”

“... worth laying down one’s life for two brothers or four cousins. This insight was formalised by William Hamilton in Oxford in the Sixties under the name of ‘kin selection’. If seemingly self-sacrificial behaviour disproportionately benefits one’s genetic kin, it once again becomes worthwhile in narrow genetic terms. In Wilson’s hands, Hamilton’s ...”

“... advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s ‘rank growth’. Dickens was true neither to life nor to his age. He was a cartoonist rather than a documentarist – not that the veracity of documentarists is to be ...”