“... at the time and he didn’t gain admission to the Club for a decade. After that, he was often back home in Auchinleck or working (more or less) in Edinburgh, while Johnson’s Turk’s Head appearances decreased as the Club expanded and became, he complained, ‘a mere miscellaneous collection of conspicuous men, without any determinate character’. Johnson ...”

“... during his career, dedicating far more energy to opposing imperialism abroad than economics at home. In any case, recent noises from the City suggest that even the banks are now far better disposed towards a Corbyn government (which would at the very least ensure a customs union with Europe) than a no deal Johnson administration. There is a more ...”

“... inequality and social stratification. The market economy, it could be said, renders the citizen lord of the marketplace in his role as consumer, but its browbeaten serf in his role as worker. And since these different roles can hardly be kept in quarantine from one another, the scope even for lordship of the marketplace will shrink: an individual will be ...”

“... backward’, his son asserted, and was generally characterised by a mulish refusal to stir from home. ‘He was . . . timid and reclusive, and he shrank from all avoidable companionship with others.’ It comes as a surprise, then, to learn of Henry’s sociable and venturesome youth. His father, Thomas Gosse, was an unsuccessful miniaturist, who made a ...”

“... he was everyone’s pal. After he’d gone to his happy hunting ground, the people of his home-town, Dampier, clubbed together to raise a statue to his memory. He now has two memorials. The episodes strung together here are the kind that circulate by word of mouth in isolated communities. One well-meaning sheila (‘woman’) attempts to burn some ...”

“... and stay in the soil for years as a threat to farm animals. If Koch could do all these things with home-made apparatus, there is surely nothing to prevent a contemporary terrorist, with the results of more than a hundred years of research on anthrax at his disposal, from setting up a spore factory and scaling up the procedure. According to the book of ...”

“... Benson, the future archbishop of Canterbury, another married the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lord Rayleigh. Eleanor’s brother was the future prime minister Arthur Balfour. Sidgwick knew a great deal about the inner workings of English politics as the various Irish and imperial crises unfolded throughout the last third of the 19th century; the unease ...”

“... enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter arrived for John Edward Dorington, lord of the manor, and his son: you are robing the working class of the Parish and their offsprings for ever in fact you are not Gentlemen but robbers and vagabonds, however if it is enclosed you shall never receive any benefit thereby as there are several on ...”

“... it should be urged that there are many black legends about Churchill, put about originally by Lord Haw-Haw and his friends during the war. One of the few certainties we still cling to is that the Nazis were defeated: but you never know, and in this context Gilbert’s defensiveness is comprehensible. In any case, it is important to stand back from the ...”

“... There is a certain pattern in this, for Henson père had quarrelled with his father and left his home on the Somerset-Devon border in his teens and worked his way up to some prosperity in business. That Henson fils was uneasy with his father, reacted against him and later began to adopt some of the old man’s prejudices is evident as the story of his life ...”

“... was built. As is clear from the tortuous story of how he financed and completed his film of Lord of the Flies, he is not immune to the bruising pleasures of making do in a commercial world (‘This was not an ideal technique,’ he says of the cut and paste editing, ‘but it was the only technique open to us’). And while his whole directorial career ...”

“... the American edition of Gerzina’s book). Neither writer refers to Gory, the black manservant of Lord Monboddo, whom Johnson and Boswell encountered on their 1773 tour of the Hebrides, or Pablo Fanque (a.k.a. William Darby), the acrobat and North of England circus proprietor. We still don’t know how successfully black people integrated with their local ...”

“... a kindly aunt, Hannah Lumb, who was willing to give her small niece a comfortable and dependable home in the Knutsford that Gaskell later remembered so sympathetically in Cranford. Despite her absent mother, Elizabeth was lucky. What emerges most clearly from Chapple’s work is a sense of the independence and vitality that characterised the prosperous ...”

“... presumably with the technical expertise required of grands projets: stock in the Dream Team, Lord Foster and the Skidmore Owings & Merrill group went up, while stock in Daniel Libeskind and others fell. But also, implicitly, one should be an echt New Yorker, and here Foster went down (maybe out), Libeskind up a bit, while the Dream Team, SOM and the ...”

“... chooses some telling anecdotes. At Cambridge, for example, Byron was evidently eager to play the lord and wore magnificent robes; but he subsequently reproached himself for spoiling his appearance in hall by ‘diffidence’. The episode gives a good clue to what is going on in his most exuberantly ‘Byronic’ poems, which, at their most ...”