“... and his more intimate correspondents include Cynthia Asquith, Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell, Edward Marsh, Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, Philip Heseltine, Mark Gertler. The letters to Russell tell a particularly vivid story. Lawrence harassed Russell relentlessly and at great length, repetitiously and in a wilfully unpleasant tone. He kept on ...”

“... to be upwards of five thousand persons – ‘the size of the Jacobite army under Prince Charles Edward Stuart’, noted the Scotsman’s reporter – assembled on the tableland for the 250th birthday. Around 10 a.m. the queue of motor carriages stretched back down into Inverness. After a dry winter the sombre morass was a lot more walkable than usual. No ...”

“... simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what is generally happening all about us here is only unutterable,’ he confessed to Brander Matthews. The country house, that central prop of the idyllic British afternoon, figured prominently in ...”

“... of these English noblemen. He was the much honoured and privileged royal servant to Elizabeth and James for more than half a century, called ‘a father of music’ in the records of the Chapel Royal at his death in his eighties; a man of affairs who, when he produced a list of reasons to become proficient in singing, emphasised first its benefits to health ...”

“... one reads for their own sakes, as one does the letters of Madame de Sevigné, Madame du Deffand, Edward Fitzgerald – or indeed of William Cowper, the new edition of whose Letters and Prose Writings has just reached its fourth volume. Yet Hardy’s letters are admirable in their way, laconic and to the point, written with his eye on the spirit-level, as ...”

“... Cavendish Square, north of Oxford Street, but still retained a mansion of 50 rooms in St James’s Square, along with other properties. As a man of commerce he invested in everything from coal to oysters, from soap to slaving, none of which commended him to Old Money. The dukes of Richmond, descended from a royal mistress, notoriously reaped a ...”

“... explore the borderlands on foot, in the hope of finding some essence of Britishness in the region James VI and I had described as the ‘navel or umbilic of both kingdoms’. While Stewart set out on his quest with undisguised polemical intent, ‘to show that there were no permanent differences between England and Scotland, between my cottage in Cumbria and ...”

“... 17th centuries is his stress on the constitutional ambiguity of the Henrician Royal Supremacy. To Edward Foxe, one of the key architects of the ideas that went into the Act in Restraint of Appeals, the supremacy was essentially caesaropapist: as Dr Guy says, ‘if national sovereignty and statutory omnicompetence in the modern sense were at stake in 1533 and ...”

“... not scrupled to use the law to gag speech, as with the indefatigably litigious Robert Maxwell and James Goldsmith. The real argument about free speech lies elsewhere. It’s not just whether you get a platform, but how big yours is compared with other people’s. Free speech means little, though not nothing, if the opportunities for influencing opinion open ...”

“... in every window in Madrid. ‘The voyage of the Knights of adventure’, as the secretary of state Edward Conway called it, finally seemed to be taking off. Buckingham recorded that Charles was in love: ‘Baby Charles is so touched by the heart that he confessed that all he ever saw is nothing to her.’ Poor Charles was not to get the girl. The infanta ...”

“... In​ autumn 2000, the critic, memoirist and biographer James Atlas brought forth a Life of Saul Bellow that augured to be the literary event of the season, a crowning glory for author and subject. Bellow: A Biography was Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... are famous) and Naples (Sir William Hamilton). There were political refugees, notably Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, and his brother, the Cardinal Duke of York (who was born in Rome and left only once to go to Paris in 1745 and prepare to go to England should the rebellion be successful). Many Jacobites had followed them and some may have ...”

“... and Palestinians. The fact is that Israel has conceded nothing, as former Secretary Of State James Baker said in a TV interview, except, blandly, the existence of ‘the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people’. Or as the Israeli ‘dove’ Amos Oz reportedly put it in the course of a BBC interview, ‘this is the second biggest victory in ...”

“... of phrases copied out from Joyce and arranged on separate lines in such a way that the letters JAMES JOYCE, repeated four times per page, may be read vertically down the centre; miscellaneous semi-colons and parentheses are scattered ad lib around the margins. Readers left unsatisfied by one such book may obtain, for 260 dollars, Cage’s double ...”

“... see the case of Shakespeare as of some significance here. Had Shakespeare been an Irishman, which James Joyce in some of his most felicitous moments liked to imagine him, he would not be the Shakespeare we know. For one thing he would have been the founder not of a worldwide empire but of a potent personal mythology. As Coleridge long ago pointed out, it was ...”