“... fleeing to California at the expense of an as yet unknown young Canadian admirer called Elizabeth Smart. Smart had read Barker’s poems and fallen in love with their author at a distance, determining in advance to bear him children on the grounds that they ‘would all be wonderful poets’. Her fixation might have been harmless if she hadn’t had ...”

“... serve to illuminate unjustifiable anomalies in British politics, such as higher spending per head north of the border and the right of Scottish MPs at Westminster to vote on specifically English legislation. These unfairnesses would not go down well with Middle England, and would almost certainly bring about an English nationalist backlash. Scottish ...”

“... an evaluation of its chances involves understanding the problems and aims of Cardinal Fleury and Elizabeth Farnese. Even though the exploration of English Jacobitism in this book is superficial, the European dimension makes it a great deal more than the exploration of an anachronistic quirk of Scottish history. It is natural that this book, while ostensibly ...”

“... had triumphed in Worcestershire, but Mary died only a year after Dean Hawford. Her successor, Elizabeth I, once more turned religion to Protestantism, including the closure of the few monasteries, nunneries and friaries that Mary’s Catholic restoration had begun to coax back into life. The dissolution of the monasteries is an old tale oft told: the ...”

“... distract sailors or bring bad luck at sea – which was just as well, because a topless carving of Elizabeth Fry or Florence Nightingale would certainly have been frowned on. Fry, who adorned a Victorian merchant ship, is depicted wearing a piecrust-collar shirt and bulky masculine jacket; Nightingale, from a similar vessel, has a capable-looking face with ...”

“... of Hutcheson and the Ulster Enlightenment of the 18th century is what is now needed both south and north of the border. He might have added that it was the Union that effectively extinguished it. ‘Heathcliff and the Great Hunger’ is the title of Eagleton’s first chapter, but it is not sufficiently indicative of the book as a whole. It inserts Brontë’s ...”

“... century that was going on outside. The ménage starts off familial: a few servants, plus Mary Elizabeth Riordan, a talented and lovely piano student from ‘an immigrant family that had suffered major misfortune’. She leaves for the Sisters of Mercy Junior College and Langley marries a lady of good family called Lila van Dijk, who ‘had a mind to ...”

“... of Spokane, one-time Lilac Princess at school, millionaire biographer of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, looks not all that different from her current subject. There is the same bright, taut face which a good surgical lift always ensures, the same immaculately-dyed and coiffeured hair, the same fixed smile exhibiting the kind of ...”

“... in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the ...”

“... family conspires against the crown. The rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace rises in the North, unhappy with reforms in the Church, and is put down. Henry VIII gets a bad leg, courts multiple possible brides, decides there are heretics both to the left and right of him, then marries Anne of Cleves in order to secure an alliance with German ...”

“... elevation of Colin Powell into some sort of co-candidate and the exceptional prominence given to Elizabeth Dole, who made the most of her opportunity by wading into the crowd on the floor to do her husband’s This Is Your Life, broadened the production’s appeal by presenting four stars instead of two. Besides, Dole has the merit of being a poor ...”

“... Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina. His reverence for the Virgin folded easily into his adoration of Hollywood’s golden age stars. But he also became something of a star himself. His early poems were inspired by queer desire and systematic derangement achieved through ...”

“... in Lords of the Lebanese Marches, based on field work he conducted in a Sunni Muslim rural area of North Lebanon during the early Seventies, before the recent civil war. This beautifully written book describes the culture of masculinity in its multiple refractions through violence and narrative, joking and play, a world where status and power are organised ...”

“... the refugees re-created their lives as farmers, merchants, mechanics and professionals in British North America, others sought out new positions in military service and imperial administration. Several, including the turncoat Benedict Arnold, placed their sons in the East India Company army. Others figured among the many ambitious, hard-up men who accepted ...”

“... advocate of comparative studies; English literature would be read alongside Russian and American, North and South, all in their original languages (he hoped to extend to the Far East, too). He insisted on the importance and independence of academia: ‘A professor can speak out on national issues of science and scholarship,’ Sloman said, ‘as a scientist ...”