“... visit him in prison because she doesn’t want to miss the delivery of her side-by-side fridge. ‘Lord God in heaven please let me have a side-by-side, let me open my eyes and it be there,’ she sighs at one point. When the court orders Vernon to be examined by a psychiatrist, he finds himself in the hands of a pervert named Dr Goosens, who is keen to prove ...”

“... to the dusty place that Enkidu discovers in Gilgamesh), often translated in the King James Bible as the ‘pit’. It was not until around the time of Christ that the Pharisees (but not the Sadducees) became believers in personal immortality, St Paul being their most famous Christian convert. Casey admires the ‘unflinching realism’ of ...”

“... the mutinies at Vellore and Ellore, and in 1811 he saw 15 minutes of battle at Cornelis as part of Lord Minto’s expedition to take Java from the Dutch. Mount gives each of the three episodes a chapter, despite Low’s minimal involvement in the action. In another chapter, mutton is literally dressed as lamb, when Low is embroiled in a mundane dispute about ...”

“... up, in a quite different sense, an elderly man who has collapsed at the urinal. This is Charles, Lord Nantwich, who also swims at the Corry, and is looking for someone to write his biography: he hires Will. Charles’s diaries are in counterpoint to Will’s narrative, describing life as a gay man in Britain when gay sex was a crime. Yet the novel suggests ...”

“... Walpole to take up sculpture for therapeutic purposes after the suicide of her dissolute husband, Lord Milton. Her special forte (apart from cross-dressing) was dog sculpture, and Walpole regarded her work as equal to Bernini’s; she also presented busts of Charles James Fox and Nelson to Napoleon – Fox, because of her ...”

“... Pope had moved, first to Chiswick in 1715 and then to Twickenham, to be ‘under the wing of my Lord Burlington’, whose protection was especially welcome in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising, when, as a Catholic, with several close friends under arrest, Pope too was an object of suspicion. Over the following years, as he repositioned himself more ...”

“... a hopeless enterprise. A court of three judges – the Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice Sales (who had been standing counsel to the government when at the bar) – had held on cogently reasoned grounds that the prior authority of an Act of Parliament was required. Nevertheless the Supreme Court sat in full, all 11 members, to hear what ...”

“... he died believing in God and in the authority of the Pope and the Catholic Church. He had not, as Lord Chancellor, imprisoned and interrogated Lutherans and sent six reformers to be burned at the stake, just so that he might die for slender modern scruple. The drained, contemporary view of More, which admires not what he believed but how he believed – his ...”

“... Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase. A word, too, should be said for his life of his father, Lord Carnock, which he regarded as his best achievement. He wrote with care and in an elegant, limpid style: but there are times when one is reminded of Balfour’s remark about Asquith, whose clarity of speech, he observed, was a positive disadvantage when he ...”

“... not fire creativity. Madness had made Kit Smart speak in tongues, shouting out vatic praise to the Lord in his ‘Jubilate Agno’. But derangement gave Cowper no flow of words, no jubilation, no pentecostal inspiration. Not for him the bohemian credo that only the purifying fire of acute mental and physical suffering can prove a poet’s mettle. Some of his ...”

“... of young, vulnerable women wandering alone in the gloom. In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James sends Isabel Archer boldly marching by herself through the ‘thick brown air’ from Euston to Piccadilly. Corton, however, suggests that the fog is ‘a metaphorical representation of this lack of light in her life, the obscurity of her emotional ...”

“... celebrate a civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a ...”

“... The first ‘poems’ by Clive James I can remember seeing were in fact song lyrics written to go with the music of Pete Atkin. I call them ‘poems’ because that’s what Clive wished them to be called. In fact, I’m not sure what they were: highbrow lyrics or lowbrow verse? Set to music, they sounded more or less OK, but ‘on the page’ they seemed sentimental and pretentious – endearing if you happened to like Clive, but almost embarrassingly overanxious to establish that the pop mode could accommodate a finely-educated literary talent ...”

“... James Boswell created the ‘Age of Johnson’, rescuing the late 18th century, above all, for the Victorians. The Boswell industry at Yale University has given an ‘Age of Boswell’ to the 20th century. This second volume of the grand Frederick Pottle-Frank Brady biography marks the climax of that long achievement ...”

“... or an old tune. My slightly frivolous title, ‘What Henry Knew’, takes us straight to Henry James, of course, and the (feeble) joke is meant, among other things, to indicate that I recognise how obvious a move this is, once we have started on the question of literature and knowledge. It was James who wrote so ...”