“... 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 ...”

“... and Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, joint labourers in the fields of edifying tediousness; Sir Charles Grandison, Coelebs in Search of a Wife and Robert Elsmere, fallen favourites; bored heroines in Austen, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Brontë; Victorian boredom in Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope; modern boredom in ...”

“... I. English-speaking America was the most momentous consequence of the civil wars which began with Charles I’s ‘suicidal disregard for Scottish public opinion’; also significant was the fact that the attempt to extend the Reformation to Ireland, which was hopelessly confused with a near genocidal colonial enterprise, failed. Given that American ...”

“... authorities answering charges of callousness. Public interest in such matters ran high: Dickens and Mayhew had whetted an appetite for accounts of nocturnal rambles among the poor, and cheap papers scrambling for readers assured a ready market for sensationalism. Perhaps it was not so surprising, then, that Greenwood’s clever brother ...”

“... who coined the term ‘eugenics’ and whose racist arguments had some influence with his cousin Charles Darwin, frequented the slave markets of Constantinople; he noted how delighted young African women seemed to be at the prospect of their impending enslavement. ‘They seemed as merry as possible at the prospect of being sold,’ he enthuses, ‘and of ...”

“... off the boat at Holyhead to the waiting London train – and thought of Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, all the great English writers I had read and studied – I felt awe, as if I was stepping onto sacred ground.’ Ireland’s painful separation from England was not, in the early days of independence, a separation from the England of high culture and ...”

“... Hall backs up the arguments of the historians H.G. Cocks (who must have heard all the jokes) and Charles Upchurch, who have claimed in two books – Nameless Offences and Before Wilde – that the point about homosexual offences in 19th-century Britain is precisely that they were not exceptional. Though there was a large and insidious increase in the number ...”

“... is likely to tell the whole story. Hence Gillray’s serial return to certain characters – Charles Fox, Napoleon, George III, the Prince of Wales, Burke, Sheridan and Pitt. The motive, the posture, the degree of deplorable wheedling would shift even as the character stayed the same.An earlier biographer, Draper Hill, judged that Gillray had ‘lifted ...”

“... liaisons and frequently say things like: ‘That’s a lovely hotel, do you know it? No? Dickens used to stay there when he came to America.’ Tartt is careful to give susceptible readers room to luxuriate in the enchanted inner circle’s Hellenistic accomplishments and Montblanc fountain pens. At the same time, she makes sure that the narrator ...”

“... on religion is overwhelmingly about the parliamentary debates in the 1880s on whether the atheist Charles Bradlaugh should be allowed to sit in Parliament without taking the Christian oath. A chapter on women is mostly about W.T. Stead’s publicity-seeking campaigns on prostitution. A chapter called ‘Ireland’ is limited to the politics of Gladstone and ...”

“... great literary texts had been thrown overboard. BDWMs (boring dead white males) like Chaucer and Dickens had given way to Batman, Louis L’Amour and Maxine Hong Kingston. Literature and history now worked exclusively ‘from below’. Stanley Hauerwas’s pronouncement that ‘the canon of great literature was created by high-Anglican assholes to underwrite ...”

“... the puritan tradition. This study by Sheila Kirk and the equally thoughtful photographs by Martin Charles that go with it at last set out the full evidence on which this claim can rest. Webb was 18 and embarking on an obscure apprenticeship in Reading when The Seven Lamps of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a ...”

“... and depravity … perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus’, popularised by Dickens and other Victorian moralists, the political elite of Ancien Régime France was astonishingly reform-minded and open to Enlightenment ideals. At the time it was swept away, the monarchy was trying hard to curtail the tax privileges of the aristocracy and ...”

“... or rounder. She smiles, meltingly, looking up something in Great Expectations, her version of the Dickens novel. ‘It’s a wonderful book – the Dickens, I mean.’ She mentions Keats, his letters to his brother. ‘Oh, he’s wonderful, isn’t he?’ Bragg agrees.And then she performs an extract from Great ...”

“... wanted the church purged of superstition and popery, and also with the Laudian party promoted by Charles I, which tended to Arminianism in theology and stressed ceremony and sacraments in worship. The Country Parson presents an ideal neither Puritan nor Laudian. It defends traditional practices Puritans disliked, such as the sign of the cross at baptism, and ...”