“... Pericles, Prince of Tyre, co-written by Shakespeare and the nastiest man in Jacobean theatre, George Wilkins (a pimp charged in 1611 with kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach) – had been a hit for more than twenty years. The play is a series of episodes as much as a unified drama, spread over 14 years, a tale of flight, family separation and reunion ...”

“... competition.With imperial responsibilities came a new hauteur towards Indigenous peoples. Sir George Simpson, the HBC’s governor in North America, turned against the custom of factors taking ‘country’ wives, dismissing them as ‘bits of copper’. In 1846, the settlement of the American border at the 49th parallel forced the HBC to retreat ...”

“... an outgrowth of the 1947 Moscow conference, where discussions between the US Secretary of State, George Marshall, and Stalin and Molotov broke down over the future of Germany. Stalin still wanted Germany broken into smaller pieces in order to contain any future threat. Now, with Soviet forces more firmly in control, he was more confident he could extract war ...”

“... that he intends to appoint one of his acolytes to be governor instead of giving ‘Steady Eddie’ George a further term and letting the markets know it sooner rather than later?15 July 1997. To St Paul’s for the memorial service for Lord Chief Justice Peter Taylor. The first and best address is given by Humphrey Potts, a ...”

“... proportion of white male Republican voters typically reaches landslide proportions, as it did for George W. Bush. Before Johnson the only Southern Democrat to have been elected President since the Civil War was Woodrow Wilson, who had built his political career in New Jersey; since Johnson, no non-Southern Democrat has gone to the White House. Losing its ...”

“... got to be at Toggers or something. I hated all that. But I had a very nice housemaster – George Lyttelton of the dreaded Letters – who allowed me to educate myself. He thought it was rather amusing that I was reading Proust, though he didn’t think it was a frightfully good idea. I was always, as a child, fascinated by things considered unsuitable ...”

“... I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up ...”

“... Waters filthy puterfaction, Our meat and drink were made, which bred Infection.The job of John Taylor, self-styled ‘water-poet’, was to keep the waterways clear. Gruber von Arni paints a grim picture of a Council of War overwhelmed by having too many people dependent on it, too few resources and waves of typhus and plague. Treatment centres were set up ...”

“... for a safer place to live, somewhere for his children to escape the fate of James Powell, or George Floyd, or Sandra Bland, or Trayvon Martin, or Breonna Taylor. But because in 1960s Harlem the odds were stacked so heavily against Black people, even if you weren’t a criminal yourself you risked being found guilty by ...”

“... from the Philological Society and the biographical dictionary from the commercial publisher George Smith. With these two projects OUP inherited a curatorial responsibility which has, over the years, become increasingly burdensome. Unlike the National Heritage Commission, OUP has the task not just of conserving important national properties – that is ...”

“... better to do in England, and were happy to be swept along in the charismatic wake of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom they had just shared an enchanted year of poetry and talk in the Quantocks in Somerset, and who was now eager to learn about German science. The principal production of their year together was the collaborative volume, Lyrical ...”

“... by the following morning the building was a blackened shell.’Afterwards a telegram arrived from George Bernard Shaw: ‘You must be delighted. Congratulations. It will be a tremendous advantage to have a proper modern building. There are a number of other theatres I should like to see burned down.’ Shaw had opened the final season in the old ...”

“... He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William Morris, George Gissing, Ebenezer Howard and a sprawl of anti-urbanists didn’t foresee was a time when that choice would, inconceivably, be in favour of the centripetal. Of course, in a faute de mieux-ish way, the city was always an unwanted lure, a resented necessity ...”

“... prodigious oeuvre. But one constituency has remained more or less silent about Blunt: the academy. George Steiner’s searching New Yorker essay in 1980 provoked no particular response from art historians and theorists. The British Academy debated Blunt’s expulsion after his exposure, but despite rancorous arguments and the dramatic resignation of ...”

“... they claim, was a newly hatched rationalism running around with the shell on its head. As Charles Taylor wrote in A Secular Age, the Reformation was ‘central to … the abolition of the enchanted cosmos and the eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith’. This is the influential master narrative to whose attempted demolition Alexandra Walsham ...”