“... Conrad, who had landed in Singapore in 1883 after himself being forced to abandon ship, to write Lord Jim. As a steam rather than a sailing ship, the Jeddah was itself a small part of the transformations which affected the calculations of economy, means of transport and time that Muslim pilgrims (then usually referred to by the British as ...”

“... Mohawk Indians), Forrest played a noble American savage up against the English, notably the evil Lord Fitzarnold. Its sub-Ossianic script gives a vivid impression both of the bare-chested, full-bodied acting that was Forrest’s stock-in-trade and of some of the sentiments that would animate the Astor Place rioters: If ye love the silent spots where the ...”

“... rather than back. Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!’ When he went home, he sat down and wrote Maurice, which he sent to Carpenter in August 1914. He was admitted into the inner circle. Forster compared Carpenter’s personality to that of a religious teacher, a guru perched in Sheffield: ‘It depended on contact and couldn’t ...”

“... a mess, complexly rearranged, a yellow matted wrinkle of scar tissue.’ They claim to want a good home for the dog, but this desire is expressed rather sardonically: ‘Where will he inspire the most contentment and where will he find canine fulfilment?’ There is certainly some resentment being projected on the dog (drain cleaner is added to his hamburger ...”

“... The most adventurous collectors of Old Masters in the first half of the 19th century, such as Lord Northwick, and the most discriminating, such as the comte de Pourtalès-Gorgier, also collected contemporary art. The former bought what was believed to be Daniel Maclise’s masterpiece, The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (1854), as well as Italian ...”

“... until he was dead. Curry was drenched in oil and set on fire. As the flames rose he chanted ‘O Lord, I’m acomin’’ so loudly he could be heard all over town. Later that day the sheriff announced that two white men – brothers – had been detained in connection with the murder and that tracks from the scene of the crime led to their house. American ...”

“... My grandfather Eugène worked in the metal factory but retired early with emphysema and ailed at home, or in cafés or on his allotment. My sister and I were surrounded by very old people – women in their eighties and nineties, like my great-grandmother Julia and her sister, Eugénie – but it’s my grandfather who symbolises old age for me, even though ...”

“... that the problem was the growth of the state, not the nature of the constitution, and that Home Rule of any kind would only entrench the new bureaucratic threat.While such appeals helped the right reclaim and hold power throughout the 1950s, Petrie suggests that they also stored up problems. Anti-socialist paranoia about central government tyranny was ...”

“... who had once enjoyed a 25 per cent share of global trade, but of whom a 19th-century proconsul, Lord William Bentinck, was to write: ‘The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’ The impact of these harsh tariffs on actual trade levels remains ...”

“... two young women hadn’t spoken before). She shared it and left what remained when she went home. Somehow news of this encounter reached her grandparents, giving them the impression that she was a drug dealer. She reassured them as best she could – but when she visited them that summer, they spoke to her on the subject, warning her that there was a ...”

“... demand. For most of his career Shakespeare not only enjoyed the backing of a single company (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men), but had the singular advantage of working in a symbiotic relationship with a group of fellow actors whose skills he learned how to develop as he was testing and exploring his own genius. Middleton, while valuing ...”

“... as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be ...”

“... She looks down at him, this importunate upper-class dandy serenading under her balcony. ‘Home, my lord!’ she says firmly. And then this: What you can say is most unseasonable; what sing, Most absonant and harsh. Nay, your perfume, Which I smell hither, cheers not my sense Like our field-violet’s breath. Of ...”

“... on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since ...”

“... the year? Not a stir, not a shoot, not a breath. And I know that at some stage that summer I went home and got a message to come back. We had no phone in our house, so I do not know how I was contacted and it was not to say that I was needed for work, but to say that there was something interesting happening in Gorey, too interesting for a 16-year-old to ...”