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“... with a lot of anxious and eager kids all wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.’ This might be Larkin to Kingsley Amis, and it’s a nice sting in the tail that we can be sure Heaney and Longley thought Olson no great thing. Even less expected is a postcard to David Hammond, a singer and TV director and one of Heaney’s ...”

“... essentially the process whereby first the Monarchy lost the substance of its prerogatives to the King-in-Parliament, and then the Lords lost most of theirs to the Commons, leaving the latter in something perilously close to full control of the State. In short, what is normally accounted the emergence of democracy. It is this process which has remained ...”

“... campaign, Jesse Jackson proclaimed himself ‘the general in this war to fight drugs’; Charles Rangel, Harlem’s longest-serving congressional representative and one of the most powerful figures in New York’s black political machine, was second to none in his opposition to drug decriminalisation. There were 130 police departments led by black ...”

“... Othello. There is nothing flashy about it. There’s no twist in the tail as there is in Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up, where the meaning of the book swivels on the final revelation that the narrator is black, so that all the assumptions of the readers of pulp picaresque are challenged. Pick-Up, as Sallis remarks in an interview with Gerald ...”

“... Darker jokes, which do have to do with the appetite for violence, flicker around memories of Charles Manson. Mickey worries that his TV ratings are lower than those for a Manson programme, but consoles himself: ‘Yeah, it’s pretty hard to beat the king.’ A group of interviewees for the TV show, identified in the ...”

“... of ships sunk’. Reporters​ soon understood they had to be cheerful. Dimbleby’s BBC colleague Charles Gardner was attached to the RAF in France when British forces were falling back to the Channel in the late spring of 1940. His diary records that an officer told the press corps they should ‘go around with bright smiling faces’. Gardner added ...”

“... Kossuth; from the brilliant conservative liberal social theorist, historian and politician Alexis-Charles-Henri-Clérel de Tocqueville, to the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, whose ultimately unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to ...”

“... Nixon Administration, but the President and Kissinger didn’t know that. Nixon therefore ordered Charles Colson, an official on his staff, to come up with a plan to ‘neutralise’ Ellsberg. Colson in turn enlisted the services of a former CIA officer called Howard Hunt, who had been the mastermind behind the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Hunt had ...”

“... in Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, were based on Fitzgerald’s early girlfriend, Ginevra King, and her classmate at the Westover School in Connecticut, Edith Cummings, a noted golfer. The men in the story are not so easy to pin down, beginning with Nick Carraway, the narrator. Carraway grew up in the Midwest and might have brushed shoulders with ...”

“... in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne. One of the many verses goes: Fiers enfants de la Lorraine Des montagnes à la plaine, Sur nous, plane ombre sereine, Jeanne d’Arc, vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan Bryce in a Suffragette procession to mark George V’s ...”

“... go with their fanciful pedigrees (they boasted of founders ranging from the first Pope Gregory to King Arthur), they adopted fancy ways of living, which involved long stays in Edinburgh and London and mounting expenditure on food, wine and clothes. In Devine’s words, the chiefs were attempting ‘to live in the style of 18th-century gentlemen on the meagre ...”

“... end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or soil it for ever: for every Nelson Mandela, there is an Aung San Suu Kyi. Greta Thunberg at 16 is one thing, but it is hard to picture her going at it with the same intensity at 45. People get ...”

“... call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the country’ to gather the iniquitous poll tax and the mood was ugly. Ackroyd mentions the incident, adding that the waters of Deptford ‘refreshed the rebellious followers of Wat ...”

“... Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the vicious pawns of a tyrannical king’. From the perspective of Westminster, the colonials were ungrateful rogue subjects who provoked needless border clashes that strained the Treasury, which had already been exhausted on their behalf in the French and Indian War. In his 1763 ...”

“... Tybalt, I have myself always assumed that since Mercutio with cheerful derision calls his enemy ‘King of Cats’, ‘Prince of Cats’, making allusion to rat-catching and the possession of nine lives; and since furthermore Elizabethans appear to have called their Tom-cats, Tib-cats – then the chances are strong that our still-surviving habit of calling ...”