“... dealing in Victoriana. Her sex-life has become lavishly promiscuous, though her resident lover, Charles, a black Old Etonian lawyer, has proved bisexual. Partly for commercial and partly for aesthetic reasons, Fanny buys an empty Victorian church in Birmingham, in the middle of an area scheduled for redevelopment as a Leisure Park. Fred Jobling, a ...”

“... the dominant woman he needs, but has mutedly warm feelings about a young Air Force officer named Charles Warden, who unlike Guy feels the romantic beauty of the Acropolis. There is a moment in an Athens hotel when Charles says, ‘I love you,’ and Harriet allows herself to be led up towards his bedroom, but the occasion ...”

“... be found in newspaper offices. Matters came to a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on the editorial ...”

“... Balmerino and Lord Kilmarnock used their last moments together to dismiss the idea that Prince Charles Edward Stuart, their ‘bonnie prince’, could have signed such an order. They both ‘vehemently denied’ it before they walked to the scaffold. Whether Cumberland himself was aware of the forgery, or even arranged it, is not known.The duke was ...”

“... work’ and followed him in describing Primavera as ‘no mere illustration of some particular passage, but a cento of many ideas’. But almost no one followed him in every detail; Horne, for his part, denied the popular notion that Botticelli had portrayed a real woman, Simonetta Vespucci – a notion which Warburg accepted. Moreover, the substance of ...”

“... of the title role from Burbage to Joseph Taylor and from records of performances in the 1630s for Charles I’s court. Even after London’s playhouses were closed by the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, an anonymous adaptor produced a truncated version suitable for surreptitious performance at fairs and taverns called The Grave-Makers, which provided the ...”

“... be a bunch of shits, by setting up and bugging conversations between Archer and a prostitute. The passage was still being thrown back at him in 1987, when a libel jury awarded record damages against the paper, thus putting paid to the suggestion that Archer had engaged in extra-marital sex. It has taken 12 years for Archer’s analysis of journalism to be ...”

“... a ministry made up of the Marquis of Rockingham and his adherents – Edmund told his friend Charles O’Hara that ‘Will and I are down on their lists and I hope and believe will be attended to.’ They were. William was appointed under-secretary to Walpole’s friend Henry Seymour Conway, who became one of the King’s two Secretaries of State, and ...”

“... burden of explanation, as William Lamont and Nicholas Tyacke have shifted it, onto the reign of Charles I and the regime of Archbishop Laud, ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the English Church’. Although that verdict is unlikely to go unchallenged, even those who question it should welcome Collinson’s determination to view the Jacobean Church ...”

“... women novelists before Jane Austen and no more than thirty men’. Then follows a remarkable passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, ...”

“... Rey claims to see the germ of Ill seen ill said, Beckett’s last brief novel, in a fragmentary passage from How it is.2 The earlier work establishes a particular cadence, which at first passes almost undetected in the rhythmic, elliptical patterning of Beckett’s narrative. The title of the new work singles out that lapidary cadence, and it becomes the ...”

“... in which he advocated such views could be very risky indeed. Peter McCullough draws attention to a passage in one of the sermons included here in which Andrewes complains about cheap and unworthy communion tables, no better than ‘oyster-boards’, and demonstrates that the immediate source for the phrase lay in Roman Catholic denunciations of Protestant ...”

“... Dr Aston, using a valuable discussion of the sources invoked in the Sherfield case under Charles I, says that ‘ultimately the Elizabethan compromise did as much to foster as to camouflage conflict.’ The study of images leads her, as the study of theology led Dr Tyacke, to reject the old Anglican-Puritan antithesis: she concludes that ...”

“... that are all dead letter, not living spirit. This is Hazlitt’s point in a little-noticed passage in an essay called ‘Whether genius is conscious of its powers’, where he argues that ‘the stimulus of writing is like the stimulus of intoxication’: ‘While we are engaged in any work, we are thinking of the subject, and cannot stop to admire ...”

“... ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far more often, we must apply our pre-fabricated theories about ...”