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“... reform had built up a great head of steam: crowds were again marching behind the banner of Tom Paine and the rights of man, there were waves of strikes and rioting, and a second French revolution had showed the aristocracy what further escalation might look like. The Reform Act of 1832 resolved the immediate crisis but left a large and vocal majority ...”

“... or a mere trunk with neither arms nor legs’. Uglow recovers the stories of individuals such as Tom Plunket of the Rifle Brigade and his wife: Tom, invalided out of the army after Waterloo, was eventually reduced to selling matches on the street; the face of his wife, who had also been at the battle, was disfigured as a ...”

“... a local council election, with trestle tables, ushers and the proctors taking the votes. One of Tom Bingham’s proposers, I vote for him and no one else, the single transferable vote (another Jenkins inspiration) likely, it’s thought, to favour Bingham’s chief rival, Chris Patten. At the table I hand in my paper to one of the junior proctors, a ...”

“... implement’. In an obituary note written after she finally succumbed to colon cancer in 1897, Henry James paid characteristically equivocal tribute to this most prolific of women writers: ‘from no individual perhaps had the great contemporary flood received a more copious treatment.’ His obituary hovered between contempt for helpless female fecundity ...”

“... full of as ifs.’ There are apparently 266 in Great Expectations alone. Where George Eliot and Henry James used analogy to guide interpretation of what a character might be thinking or feeling, in Dickens it is always a performance on the author’s part, a conjuring of unlikely associations (he was a gifted amateur magician). Mullan, however, rightly ...”

“... by the absurd photograph on Bruce’s dust-wrapper – rather than of preachers like Henry Cooke and ‘Roaring’ Hugh Hanna, men outside the establishment, is symptomatic of the distortion. In fact, liberals would certainly be happier with Paisley if he were a politician bent on power and thus forced to battle, and compromise, for mainstream ...”

“... gayer than his reputation, actually singing “Frankie and Johnny”.’ Frankie and Johnny, or Tom and Viv? He was her man, but he done her wrong? The marketers of Ackroyd’s book have done both him and Eliot wrong in sensationalising it. The new Vanity Fair, which unlike the old one is not a magazine for which a T.S. Eliot would write, announced its ...”

“... business partner James Hessey gave a dinner for him, at which Clare met and became friends with Henry Cary, whose translation of Dante he draws on in ‘To the Snipe’. A week after returning to Helpston, he married Patty Turner, who was pregnant. An announcement of the wedding was placed in the London Magazine, and Hessey sent Clare a Cremona violin. When ...”

“... were rarely positive, and were often savage. The high watermark for criticism was set early by Henry James, a friend of the family, who was sent the handwritten first draft of Fred’s Dodo. His response is a small masterpiece of positive restraint: I am such a fanatic myself on the subject of form, style, the evidence of intention and meditation, of ...”

“... antagonism to Bush’s deliberate pace and prose. Like those establishment figures, epitomised by Henry Kissinger, who are the self-conscious heirs of the Anglo-European conservative tradition in foreign policy, with its emphasis on balance and order, liberal commentators were moved by a sensation of danger impending from a massive convulsion within the ...”

“... in Germany, Taiwan and South Korea.There were other ways of waging ‘limited war’. In 1957, Henry Kissinger argued for smaller, tactical nuclear weapons. Kaufmann and others pulled his argument apart by showing how easily the use of small nuclear weapons on the battlefield would escalate to full thermonuclear exchange. But this wasn’t enough to stop ...”

“... they supervised imprisonment orders made anywhere, by anyone, for any reason.’ Chief Justice Sir Henry Montagu, writing in 1619, described habeas corpus as a ‘writ of the prerogative by which the king demands account for his subject who is restrained of his liberty’. It was a remedy developed, primarily, in the court of King’s (and ...”

“... into the mountain to pray, Himself, Alone.’ The title also reminded me of a revealing moment in Henry McDonald’s earlier biography (a mere 340 pages, published in 2000), when a friend describes bumping into Trimble in the law courts in Belfast on the day his divorce from his first wife was granted: ‘I remember being surprised to see him on his own. He ...”

“... were also granted by authorities other than the Crown, a practice ended by statute in 1536, when Henry VIII obtained sole and exclusive authority ‘to pardon or remit any treasons, murders, manslaughters or any kinds of felonies’. By the time of the American Revolution, four features of the royal prerogative of pardon deserve mention. First, the reigning ...”

“... in the emerging Cold War as against Japan in the World War Two endgame. He accuses Time editor Henry Luce, the man who coined the expression ‘the American century’, of proceeding in the manner of a Fascist in his role as leader of the post-World War Two pro-Nationalist China lobby. Although he sides with the United States in the Cold War, Evans comes ...”