“... a seductive glamour about the squires going off to war, and a potent sorrow when they did not come home. But though Johnston can be impersonal about himself, he cannot be that way about his brother. The poem tries to find outlets for grief in several different formal schemes, including blank verse. The stiff upper lip relaxes, leaving eloquence ...”

“... of his friends and patrons in the Young England movement. As the creator of Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Frederick Verisopht, not to mention the Lady Flabella, Dickens must have had to swallow hard before praising this hymn to nobility. The next time Dickens tried his hand at art criticism was nearly five years later, on 15 June 1850, when he published a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... itself. The Folger, the establishment of which guaranteed America’s pre-eminence as a home for Shakespearean textual studies, is only the most spectacular example of the trend for that country’s 19th and early 20th-century capitalists to make F1 a high-prestige bequest to their fellow-citizens – or, to put it more cynically, a commodity of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”