“... solidity of St Martin-in-the-Fields, how both structures dwarf Sir Francis Chantrey’s statue of George IV, and how the unfinished column, in extending out of frame, becomes the sign of a future to which, at least in this picture, neither crown nor church measures up. And then there’s the wooden hoarding that cuts diagonally along the lower edge. The ...”

“... survived the death of Puritanism. Carrying along nationalist historians like the Jacksonian George Bancroft, American Renaissance writers such as Hawthorne and Melville, and political leaders like Lincoln, the sacralisation of the United States created ‘the single most cohesive culture in the modern world’. Americans share not a common middle-class ...”

“... a whole are identical to the ones that were made in the 1820s, and are just as irrelevant. In 1867 Walter Bagehot pointed out how wrongheaded they were to complain about the attention paid to Victoria’s promenades at Windsor or the Prince of Wales’s trips to the Derby. Popular fascination with ‘a retired widow and an unemployed youth’, he insisted, was ...”

“... of Bulgaria and Dalmatia? Legends of a great flood permeated many traditions. In 1876, George Smith published his translations of the cuneiform writing preserved on baked-clay tablets from Mesopotamia – which recorded what we now call the Epic of Gilgamesh. These fragments from the great library of Nineveh spoke, in a language known as ...”

“... to the rakish, ‘gay dog’ critic. Keynes also mortified Woolf by telling her that her memoir of George Duckworth, later published as 22 Hyde Park Gate, was the best thing she had ever done. He advised her bluffly to carry on in that vein, ‘write about real people & make it all up’, causing her to reflect that ‘if ...”

“... endeared him to the Conservative Central Office. As Norman Tebbit replied, in words reminiscent of Walter Bagehot, it is not surprising that the Prince is so sympathetic towards the unemployed: he is by way of being one of them himself. All this is indicative of a deeper change in perceptions of royalty that has taken place during the last decade or so. The ...”

“... to become contagious.’ This confession comes at the end of Delany’s engaging new biography of George Gissing, and suggests the special difficulty of spending long periods in the company of the English novelist most known for the relentless pessimism of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life. The dean of Gissing studies, Pierre ...”

“... briefly by an unregarded few. And so it comes about that the Victorians – Browning, no less than George Eliot – are back in favour, not just for their undemanding and verbally profligate forms but for their portentous preoccupation: how to lose religious faith and yet preserve all the psychological comforts which that faith had afforded. More than a ...”

“... author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a tragic irony of events Sir John, who was younger than Eden, predeceased him. Various possibilities have been canvassed since Eden’s death. The choice for ...”

“... Fatal Rivalry: Flodden 1513 provides a welcome antidote to the usual run of work on the period. George Goodwin places the events of 9 September 1513 in the context of the two kingdoms and their interrelated royal dynasties over the quarter-century leading up to the battle. He follows most Scottish historians in being impressed with James IV’s qualities as ...”

“... in the work which, more than any other book, provided the title-deeds of the cultural revival: George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect, published by Edinburgh University Press in 1961, was fallible as a history of Victorian Scottish universities, but an eloquent restatement of the deductive basis of the Scottish intellectual tradition assaulted by Buckle ...”

“... with jottings and sketches. The fullest notes are for his last incomplete novel, Denis Duval. George Eliot seems to have begun making her collections of notes, or quarries, for novels with her third full-length work, Romola. Charles Reade began to rely on his system of note-making with his third novel, It is never too late to mend. Trollope claimed not to ...”

“... the links between them and their often disparate specialities have never previously been explored. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo feature among the less familiar scholars, and some painters, including Bonnington and Delacroix, make brief appearances. As these names suggest, Hill has much to tell us about Anglo-French relations, present as well as past.We ...”

“... says of an occasion early in the orchestra’s history when the players had been rehearsing with Walter Susskind. Ruth Railton lived for this intensity. She gave up a promising career as a pianist to find it. She was in love with the capacity of children to love music. ‘The freshness that comes from the first experience of a great work’, ‘the natural ...”

“... by asking them how they spent the leisure time that the magazines of the 1890s loved to celebrate. George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as ‘cycling and showing off’.Today’s Who’s Who remains a child of the 1890s. The editorial board stands by the book’s original intention, to recognise people whose ‘prominence is inherited, or depending upon ...”