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“... We​ had seen bare land/And the people bare on it’: two lines from a retrospective poem by George Oppen that appeared in 1963 in a small magazine published out of New Rochelle, the poet’s birthplace. Oppen (b. 1908) had recently broken a long silence and become a poet of his time – the 1960s and 1970s – however much he may have insisted, as he did in the same poem, that he was ‘of the Thirties ...”

“... English in the American academy. If anyone qualifies as an expert on academic instincts, it must be Marjorie Garber. She has been aptly described by the New York Times as ‘one of the most powerful women in the academic world’, and in Prospect as ‘the reigning queen of cultural studies’. In a career that spans ...”

“... Carefree:​ that must be the essence of the sporting idea, whether you are doing it with Amaryllis in the shade, or on the village green with your grandchild Wilhelmine. You are disported, carried off out of yourself. In botany, a ‘sport’ is the wayward offshoot of an otherwise predictable shrub. The definition of ‘a real sport’ is a girl like Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey: ‘And it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books ...”

“... led to its publication as a three-volume novel in October 1862, under the name M.E. Braddon. By December, Lady Audley’s Secret had gone through eight editions, and Braddon’s tale of false identities, desertion, detection, bigamy, blackmail, arson, madness and murder had brought her celebrity and become the template for a genre. ...”

“... Margaret Rhondda, a peeress in her own right, campaigned energetically, albeit unsuccessfully, to be allowed to take her seat in the House of Lords. Hilda Matheson was 32 in 1920 and newly appointed political secretary to Nancy Astor. She appears on the cover of Michael Carney’s biography, first published in 1999 and recently reissued, photographed in ...”

“... Yet it’s also hard to deny that the institutions of US society unfailingly worked for him. Jeff Hobbs, who was Peace’s roommate at Yale, shows that at every stage of Peace’s life, his gifts were not just recognised but cultivated. He may have started selling marijuana to help his mother pay the rent, but his family didn’t have the crippling debts that ...”

“... unexpected building in Port Glasgow is a castle – Newark Castle, inherited in the 17th century by the Maxwell family, who turned it from an austere tower house into what the guidebook calls a Renaissance mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to ...”

“... deliberate cover enabling him to suborn those politically committed to the left. (As will be seen, King’s has a tradition of involvement with the Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had ...”

“... January, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. On 24 February, the police, augmented by the newly enrolled ‘auxiliary police’ of stormtroopers grouped under such edifying names as the Robbers and the Pimp’s Brigade, raided Karl Liebknecht Haus. In anticipation of this, the KPD had been exfiltrating its records to private addresses. Its top ...”