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“... provides a worthy set-piece climax where we seem to know every inch of pavement over which Lord Revelstoke of Barings hurries in tears. Above the masses of clerks and fraudsters and Quakers and spivs, three heroes stand out and preside over Kynaston’s account. The first is Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who on page five irrupts into the narrative, which is ...”

“... persuaded to allow Carol to mount a private prosecution, an extreme rarity in Scotland, where the Lord Advocate is in charge of all prosecutions. Records of the past three centuries are thick with failed attempts by individuals to take private proceedings, but Carol succeeded where most others had not. The case resulted in her attackers being punished and ...”

“... the era of the international gold standard. Currencies that were once mere receipts for gold now lord it over the metal. Priced in dollars, gold has lost two-thirds of its value since 1980. In the intervening decades, the cost of living has at least doubled in many countries, so that gold has lost ground against almost all other species of asset. To the ...”

“... Charles James Fox was early hailed as ‘the phenomenon of the age’: an Infant Phenomenon like his chief opponent and perfect foil, William Pitt, who, Fox’s mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan dissipation, already strong on him, did not distract him ...”

“... black, with their entirely bogus link to the tribal names of Highland Scotland, described by the Lord Lyon King of Arms as ‘humbug’ and by Lt-Col. M. M. Haldane in the most closely-argued study of the matter as a ‘myth’. I owe this information to the Highlander magazine for August, published from Chicago and itself partly a catalogue of clannish ...”

“... or being pursued by Lords Cholmondeley, Coleraine and others, before she settled down with Charles James Fox. Though many, perhaps most, of the women travellers were eminently respectable, being accompanied by husbands or fathers (like Horace Walpole’s darling Mary and Agnes Berry), a surprising number went on their own. The amorous affairs of the young ...”

“... pocket-slim volumes of the Buildings of England, take years to complete each hefty replacement. James Bettley, responsible for the new Essex volume, did not even have to bother with Ilford, Romford, Leyton and Walthamstow. With the setting up of the GLC and the new administrative boundaries of 1965, Essex, as the blurb to the Shell Guide quaintly puts ...”

“... impostors of all: women who masqueraded as military men. The tyrannical army surgeon Dr James Barry – prone to picking quarrels and partial to red-heeled, thigh-high boots paired with an outsized dress sword – doesn’t figure in Stoker’s parade. It’s a strange omission – Barry’s story was well known to Edwardians – but Stoker had ...”

“... Fanny has had a long gestation. In 1961, as an undergraduate, she was taught by the late Professor James L. Clifford, Johnson’s biographer, who had the admirable policy of inviting his class to imitate an 18th-century author instead of writing yet another academic paper on him. At the time, Ms Jong came up with a mock epic in heroic couplets in the manner of ...”

“... leave hardly any room, if experienced in the flesh, for a satisfaction of the wish to write books. James Pfeiffer tells how he wishes to be a fisherman, and to have a boat of his own one day, an inshore lobster boat. Meanwhile, for the duration of the novel, he goes quite far out to sea on board the Grey Ghost, a trawler whose crew meets with a succession of ...”

“... It may be an accident of rereading that makes me want to put James Baldwin’s essays and novels together, to see The Fire Next Time and Giovanni’s Room, for example, as versions of each other. But the matched books do make interesting sense: more thoughtful sense, perhaps, than the already powerful separate stories ...”

“... begetter of admiration in other people. Yet none that loved him could easily match the love of James Boswell, who puttered along for many years, joyously, drunkenly, boisterously, earnestly, with his love of Dr Johnson both a wondrous act of worship and a curious kind of self-loving. Arm in arm on their way up the High Street, Boswell and Johnson were a ...”

“... as authoritative, rather than authorised. An authorised biography was to have been written by James Pope-Hennessy, who had gathered much material before he came to his violent end. Hoare received the ‘approval and co-operation’ of the Coward estate. Over the years other hands had tried to pluck away the veils from the Coward legend. We read how ...”

“... The recipient of the following letter was Sir James Hayes-Sadler, Governor of the East African Protectorate (soon to become known as the Colony of Kenya). Its author was a British settler writing from Nyeri, in the colony’s newly established ‘white highlands’. The year was 1908.            Dear Sir James Sadler,      A grave matter has occurred here ...”

“... many, though the genuinely anguished cries of true devotees can also be heard above the din. When Lord Moran published his take-the-temperature-and-tell memoirs in 1966, not only breaching doctor-patient confidentiality but also revealing that WWW2 was sometimes ill as well as often tipsy, not to say smashed (things, to be sure, entirely unexpected of a ...”