“... be that Britain’s way of opening up the country – with gunboats – was counter-productive. Charles Elliot, a far gentler envoy than Pottinger, which is why Palmerston eventually sacked him, thought it would have been (in Lovell’s paraphrase) ‘better for the long term to bank goodwill than hard cash’. In the very long term this has turned out to ...”

“... done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery Sam, ‘Old Peepy’, a mixture of Charles Pooler and Paul Pry, a natural target for clerihews (‘Sam Pepys, Gives one the crepys’) and the wags of 1066 and All That. If the diary had been seized and burned by the hangman his reputation need never have suffered, though he might well have been ...”

“... with ‘good humour’, though of a ‘deeply buried’ kind. The effect is a bit like reading a Dickens novel peopled entirely by Joe Gargerys and Esther Summersons – you long for a villain to come along and shake things up. (Certainly, the conversations about faith and reason would be more engaging if everyone wasn’t so weirdly tolerant of the opposing ...”

“... husband William Godwin, their daughter Mary Shelley, and a crowd of later locals which includes Dickens, who lived there as a child, though sadly not Hazlitt, whose Liber Amoris is set in Somers Town. The mural is the work of the artist Karen Gregory. It’s on the side wall of a school, above a bit of waste ground, and I’m told it is under ...”

“... in factories and mines. This was an uneasiness that showed itself early in the century. When Charles Lamb thinks about childhood poverty in his ‘Popular Fallacies’ of 1826, it is of little girls that he writes: It makes the very heart bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her little girl … It is not of toys, of nursery ...”

“... transcript of the fragment and then an attempt to complete and translate it. The book’s author, Charles Adams, may have been trying to compensate for the flimsy plot. Twin girls, who share a psychic ability to feel each other’s pain, are separated as children when the younger, Catherine, is stolen by Gypsies. The elder, Gertie, grows up and gets married ...”

“... he was, however much he warred with the notion, Thom loved no authors more than Shakespeare and Dickens, and revisited both on pretty nearly an annual basis, usually over the summer when he had the most time. He liked picking up younger men and doing methamphetamine with them, and enjoyed bringing off a splendid poem of his own devising best of all – as ...”

“... the process. His title, the friendship of the Queen, the affection and admiration of such peers as Dickens, Carlyle, Browning and George Eliot, and the veneration of almost everybody else, somehow came to seem the natural outcome of his use of his talent; and much in his later life may be attributed to his having grown into his role. Yet through it all he ...”

“... that she had never heard of the parable of the talents. She was a snob. She tried to dissuade Dickens from going to America wiih the advice: ‘Go down to Bristol and see some of the third or fourth-class people, and they’ll do just as well.’ Holland was by contrast kindly and genial, soothing the feelings which his wife had ruffled, drawing his ...”

“... Manby Gully made quick fortunes, though Gully was eventually disgraced by his involvement in the Charles Bravo murder mystery. Hembry records that those who undertook the cold-water cure at Malvern included Gladstone (a glutton for self-discipline), Macaulay, Dickens, Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin and Florence Nightingale, but ...”

“... emerged very early, shaped by family circumstances. Born in 1812 (he was an exact contemporary of Dickens), Pugin was an only child, cherished and praised. He was the product of an unlikely alliance between Auguste Pugin, a Parisian illustrator who had escaped revolutionary chaos by moving to London in 1792, and Catherine Welby, the forceful but impoverished ...”

“... of Willingale was a quiet country parson in the 1780s. His forebear Sir John Bramston had been Charles I’s lord chief justice, and in 1635 he very prudently bought Skreens Park, a few miles west of Chelmsford. There he and his family remained, heads down, for the duration of the Civil War. Following a similar logic, a three-storey-deep indestructible ...”

“... biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events in at least 45 countries, and, on or around 24 November, there was another spate of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of ...”

“... his family but also to literary friends from Newport and Boston such as Thomas Sergeant Perry and Charles Eliot Norton. To Norton on Germans, for example: ‘Such men – such women – such children! … Even the comparatively good-looking ones suffer from the ugliness of the others & are injured by the hideous contagion.’ To his brother William on ...”

“... for the rest of your life, would you not prefer to dine with, say, Carlyle, or George Eliot, or Dickens, or Ruskin, or Tennyson, or even Gladstone? There might be torrential monologues, harsh tirades, uncomfortable silences, but at least you would have experienced a force of nature, you would have trod the slopes of the volcano. Bagehot, by contrast, tells ...”