“... certain Thomas Brown in 1750, for the price of £350. Ten years before, the Royal Burgh’s sunken wells, dank and rotten, had been replaced by the Council. Pump wells were installed, and fresh water was all the rage. The second half of the 18th century, in a small Scottish marketing town like Irvine, was the period of great ...”

“... unbreathable. But he kept up – by letter – with his old Fabian intimates, the Webbs and Wells, and had a joky intimacy with persons as diverse as Lady Astor, Virginia Woolf and the heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. He was sporadically in touch, affectionate and censorious, with Mrs Patrick Campbell, and kept a kindness for scapegraces such as Lord ...”

“... Institute and was long rumoured to have been the source for the cut of its former director Stanley Wells’s beard; for some reason this picture looks slightly out of focus, as though seen through the wrong reading glasses). Macmillan’s accountants must be relying on the book selling in large quantities and over a long period in order to recoup their ...”

“... disturbances, big and small, give his poetry its character. The opening lines of ‘Tunbridge Wells’, a satire on the ‘fooles’ who flock to the spa town, are casually respectable but unmistakably dirty: ‘Att five this Morn: when Phoebus rais’d his head/From Thetis Lapp …’ What has Phoebus been up to? In ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’, a ...”

“... with the ‘time of old sin’ – whether a fantastical Alma-Tadema-ish Ancient Rome, or a John Addington Symonds Athens, where pederasty was not merely permissible but praiseworthy – drifted, for those who survived their heady youth of Baudelaire and absinthe, into the Aesthetes’ religion, in which chalices and smoke played their part. ...”

“... of any literary stature were only too aware of the tradition of publishing correspondence. John Evelyn, for example, arranged his manuscript letter books to resemble a collection on the classical model. The privacy of the letter was a vexed issue. Once cast into the mailbag it was lost to the sender but might never arrive: ‘I am very uneasy about the ...”

“... one side, and studies of religion in the English Revolution on the other. Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne are subjects: literature has seen to that. And so is Puritanism: America has seen to that. But not the ordinary mainstream history of the Jacobean Church. We still tend to see that history through Victorian eyes, our understanding of early Stuart ...”

“... wasn’t much more than that going on in London but they did get Merce Cunningham at Sadler’s Wells every now and again, and that was a revelation. I went to see every programme and made notes of what I could remember, while waiting at Didcot on successive evenings for the last train home. By the time I went to New York in 1989, I was fully aware that I ...”

“... and others merely succumbed to in ignorance, costs both human and material were being counted by John Maynard Keynes, who agonised about working for a government he despised ‘for ends I think criminal’. The war had, indeed, fast become an increasingly disreputable enterprise which with every discarded corpse raised the stakes of peace. Blinded by the ...”

“... Williams went round New England collecting plant specimens, plunging thermometers into deep-water wells and tracking the migratory patterns of birds, in order to confirm his theory that the arrival of Christianity and industry on the continent had induced a more temperate climate – a view shared by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Gibbon read ...”

“... Grosskurth’s contribution, remembering her last biographical effort with pleasure. Her book on John Addington Symonds, now 16 years old, is one of the genuinely original works of its kind, a detailed and sensitive rescuing of its subject from the Victorian silence that entombed him. In writing about Symonds, historian of the Renaissance, Ms Grosskurth ...”

“... and abortion – and were in need of ‘protection’ (the theme of one chapter). H.G. Wells’s dreadful treatment of them, and his other moral inadequacies, are a running theme of the book, along with his warnings about class conflict. Periodically from the 1880s, and especially after 1910, trade union militancy became impossible to ...”

“... Glass happened on her lab specimens – who did have the means.Prospecting a hundred years, H.G. Wells wrote: ‘The London citizen of the year 2000 AD may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb.’ He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together he talks to her about Marie Antoinette ...”