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“... to wallow in self-pity. Boston’s Irish were not alone in their resentments. Martin Luther King was pelted with bricks when he led marches in Chicago’s Polish and Lithuanian enclaves during the summer of 1966. Throughout the 1970s, Italians in Brooklyn fiercely defended their turf from blacks. And in 1972, whites in Pontiac, Michigan, a blue-collar ...”

“... nothing of the promised gift. The little scene sounds like a parodic reminiscence of the scene in King Lear when Goneril and Regan reduce Lear’s retinue from 100 knights to none. The citation of a great many forgotten novels from which Austen probably learned something, the demonstration that she familiarised herself with ‘the disinheritance novel’ as a ...”

“... of his household servants. K.K.’s world is ‘as measured and as concentric as that of the Sun King at Versailles’, his old age passing in ritual rounds of visits, bridge games, whisky drinking, walks taken in the garden for his health. His implacable confidence in his own importance makes him almost passive, and he’ll do anything to avoid ...”

“... one of the more striking endpoints for thousands of prints. Grangerising took its name from James Granger’s A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, Consisting of Characters Disposed in Different Classes (1769). By taxonomising history into ‘a Methodical Catalogue of Engraved British Heads’, with blank leaves ...”

“... so at times; in 2014, Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, published a respectable biography of James Madison. Still, there’s a lurking suspicion that the public interest in the lives of dead white patriarchs is predominantly hagiographical.Stacy Schiff’s life of the revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams is an unobtrusively subversive contribution to the ...”

“... accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern brass plaque affixed to the frame confidently ...”

“... demonstration, in Trafalgar Square, complete with mounted police; his graduate thesis, on Henry James, was never finished. With friends he founded the Universities and Left Review, which in 1960 merged with the New Reasoner, then run by Dorothy and E.P. Thompson, to become the New Left Review, of which Hall became the founding editor. He moved to London and ...”

“... parts of Ukraine: a lavish setting of Khachaturian’s Spartak and a new opera, Embroidered: The King of Ukraine, about the early 20th-century Habsburg adventurer and Ukrainophile Archduke Wilhelm, with music by Alla Zahaikevych and a libretto by the ubiquitous Serhiy Zhadan. Now performances have gone underground, to a makeshift stage in the theatre’s ...”

“... at Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685, to begin his rebellion against his uncle, the new Catholic monarch, James II, Defoe left his young wife, Mary, whom he had married eighteen months before, to join the rebels. Novak notes that some of his former schoolmates at Morton’s Academy lost their lives in the rebellion, but he does not name them. This is a pity, because ...”

“... his opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your ...”

“... its ancestry back to the legendary Lucius Junius Brutus who had supposedly expelled the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, in 510 bc, and served as one of the first consuls (the highest elected official in the new Republic) the following year. Brutus was proud of his heritage: he had his family tree painted in the atrium of his house, plotting his ...”

“... it’s well known. Dylan is among the (male) English (language) poets here: the translators of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Stevens, Frost – all figure prominently. Much of what Ricks has to say on this ...”

“... of my flesh, she will be called woman because she is taken out of man.’ This is why, as the King James Bible has it, ‘a man shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be one flesh’ – surely the best use of the word ‘cleave’, which means both to join together and to split apart. Neither fusion​ nor repetition can hold together this ...”

“... the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of Delmore Schwartz appeared in 1977 and who is the general editor of the Penguin Lives Series, was given full access to Bellow’s letters and unpublished manuscripts and final permission to quote all the passages he wanted to ...”

“... relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”