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“... It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976 ...”

“... hearings and the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. In both cases national telecasts offered Americans a civic education. They now have a far greater understanding of the Constitution than they could possibly have gained from a dozen or more Bicentennial celebrations. Judge Bork ...”

“... been powerfully challenged, especially by historians working in the Marxist tradition, from E.P. Thompson to Robert Brenner; and the old technological determinism was already giving way to very different interpretations of Marx. Cohen’s account of Marx’s theory of history, for all its ‘analytic’ refinements and ...”

“... makes them seem like Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, respectively. In The Great Cat Massacre (1984) Robert Darnton described a night in Paris in the late 1730s when two apprentice printers went on the hunt for cats and staged a mock-trial before hanging them, to the raucous delight of their apprentice colleagues: the episode, as Darnton tells it, was an ...”

“... shared in government, whether by royal appointment or congenital right. According to I.A.A. Thompson, the favourite, or valido as he was known in Spain, on which Thompson is an authority, emerged ‘at a particular moment in the development of the central administration’. He represented ‘a window of transition ...”

“... and with the sharpest eye in the business for the tricks of the capitalists. The publication of Robert Gildea’s recent book, which successfully weaves the strands of scientific, cultural and economic developments into a political and military narrative, and of Gerald Newman’s unfamiliar case for the growth of an English nationalist culture from ...”

“... to have been less thorough than one might wish, to judge by a number of minor slips, such as that Robert Oppenheimer escaped from Germany, or that the Uranium-235 bomb is started by firing two hemispherical pieces together. He blames Alexander, Minister of Defence in 1947, for basing military planning on the ill-conceived assumption that there would be no ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”

“... an essay entitled ‘Hypocrisy and Democracy’ in his wonderfully measured new collection, Dennis Thompson quotes Judith Shklar, who described the politics of anti-hypocrisy as an ‘unending game of mutual unmasking’, in which everyone is bound to lose. Because democracy is a system of government that institutionalises distrust, as the price we pay for ...”

“... of the First World War, London still beckoned aspiring American poets. Ezra Pound arrived in 1908, Robert Frost in 1912, and T.S. Eliot in 1914. When Pound arrived he was only 23, Eliot was 26, but Frost was almost 39. He had been writing poetry, most of it unpublished, for some twenty years, and the difference in style was striking. Set beside the early work ...”

“... cut. The quotation ends with ‘What unfailing taste he possessed’ – full stop.) Jarrell, as Robert Lowell once observed, was actually more of a eulogist than a destroyer and it was in the realm of eulogy that his weakness for near-spluttering exaggeration was at its most off-putting. When Jarrell admired a writer, that writer had to be vaunted to the ...”

“... a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore Sottsass, ‘Neal Cassady, Los Gatos, California’ (1962) Bernard ...”

“... from mistakes made by a panicked magistracy rather than from premeditation or government diktat. Robert Walmsley’s Peterloo: The Case Reopened (1969), published on the 150th anniversary, sought to exonerate his ancestor William Hulton, chairman of the Lancashire and Cheshire magistrates. Walmsley claimed the justices were the real victims of ...”

“... could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank Thompson, whom he knew at Winchester, and who was executed in Bulgaria for fighting with the anti-Nazi resistance. The portrait of Thompson belongs here because it is part of the war, but perhaps also as a contrast with ...”

“... what it is like to be a child, though the occasional exceptions – Dickens, Orwell and Flora Thompson – sketch in the outline of this vast unexplored continent. Perhaps this is one reason why historians have so rarely written about childhood. And even if they do write about it – when discussing the history of education, for example – they often ...”