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“... legislation and Asbos proliferated), and now its immigration policy. Shortly after William Hague became Tory leader in 1997, Labour took up the Tories’ rhetoric about asylum seekers and gypsies. Its response to the riots in the north of England in 2001, which pitted young Asian men against the far right and the police, was to blame local ...”

“... or experimental verse, as opposed to more traditional or mainstream poets such as Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur – the sorts likely to be published in the New Yorker and awarded Pulitzers. In those days, you were on one side or the other. Creeley was defiantly on The New American Poetry side, and his work figures prominently in that hugely ...”

“... fierce heat that had succeeded an iron winter: already in March, the month of Fenton’s arrival, William Russell of the Times was cursing the hand-knitted mittens still arriving in their thousands from worried mothers. The rising temperatures interfered disastrously with the chemicals, necessitating longer exposure times, cooking the nitrate, drying out the ...”

“... crusade, he had enlisted in Marshal Schomberg’s regiments of refugee Frenchmen fighting for William of Orange against the Catholic King James in Ireland, and ended up dying in Belfast, like so many soldiers in early modern armies, not fighting in battle, but from a disease caught in camp in Dundalk. His son, another ...”

“... of good faith. This procedure was surprisingly routine. In the 13th and early 14th centuries, William Chester Jordan estimates, around five hundred people abjured the realm each year.Before the Hundred Years’ War, abjurers departed most often from Dover and fled to France, where they might join immigrant labour gangs, seek pardon or continue their ...”

“... cinema could do the job so much better. The novel should find a new function for itself. Back to James Joyce, in a way, who opened the first cinema in Dublin in 1909. In 1973 Johnson suggested that the human craving for storytelling was served by television soaps. It still is. Johnson’s prose is, in itself, Orwellian in its lucidity. It harbours much ...”

“... large question of the Will coming in, sometimes alarmingly, and particularly interesting to Henry James. In The Bostonians he put this exchange between Olive Chancellor, the intense young spinster, and Verena Tarrant, the easy-going, delightfully Mozartian creature who can be so fervently eloquent at feminist meetings, and who will eventually be carried off ...”

“... whom Kenner singled out as the most honourable exceptions: Charles Tomlinson, who applauded William Soutar, and Basil Bunting, who befriended MacDiarmid. Yet Tomlinson and Bunting are the true mavericks, as Kenner recognised. They are mavericks because, while acknowledging class-based and region-based resentment, in themselves as in others, they refused ...”

“... within lay religion may sometimes look like special pleading. An old man of Cartmel, told in James I’s reign of Jesus Christ and His saving power, remarked: ‘I think I heard of that man ... once in a play at Kendal called Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree and blood ran down.’ For most historians the story reveals an abyss of ...”

“... became ex officio head of the Church of England. On any view this was going to be a problem, and James II as he now was, egged on by his theological advisers, made the worst of it. Among other unwise moves he declared the Test Acts, which barred Catholics and dissenters from public office, to be of no effect, allowing him to commission Catholics as army ...”

“... figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ‘gamechanger’ of ...”

“... word “love”,’ Billie Holiday says in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (written in 1956 with William Dufty and now reissued). Like Kafka’s hunger artist, Holiday let song make a spectacle of her deprivation. ‘I don’t need a friend/My heart is broken, it won’t ever mend/I ain’t much carin’/Just where I will end,’ she sang in ‘I Must Have ...”

“... from Provincial Life II’, a deliberate pairing with Boyhood. The subtitle (used by William Cooper for a novel in the 1960s, but that’s probably been forgotten) hovers between storytelling and remembering. Certainly, the facts of this life are Coetzee’s. After the uneasy South African childhood we read about in Boyhood, he went to the ...”

“... question was handed by Robert to two reputable bankers as collateral for a loan. It was signed by William Adair, a wealthy Army agent whom Robert claimed as a close acquaintance. The bankers were willing to swear that Robert had acted throughout as if he were innocent. When they confronted him with their suspicions of foul play and took the matter up with ...”

“... and the later Whig hero. Newton first came into political prominence when he led the opposition to James II’s attempt to intrude a Benedictine monk into Cambridge without his taking the statutory oath of loyalty to the Established Church. Newton refused to take Anglican orders, but Popery for him had always been absolute evil: in 1714, he tried to get an Act ...”