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“... Smiles dwelled on the ability of ‘the humblest’ to define themselves and make their own mark on the world. His heroes are tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, weavers, servants and common day-labourers – trades grouped together as the producers of ‘great men of science, literature and art’. Capsule biographies of these great men form the bulk ...”

“... to the inner circle of either Bloomsbury generation. Like her fellow painter and sometime lover Mark Gertler she worked ‘on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’, as the handout at Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury puts it. The Pallant House exhibition (until 27 April) and its accompanying catalogue succeed in moving Carrington out of the shade, not ...”

“... musical entertainment. Its greatest figure, who has been properly honoured in the 536 pages of Mark Tucker’s Duke Ellington Reader, a ‘source-book of writings on Ellington’, lived and died as a travelling band-leader. It was not that he had to – in his later years he subsidised his band out of his royalties – but that he could not conceive of ...”

“... perhaps, is the omission of any reference to the most important Ralegh discovery in recent years, Mark Nicholls’s publication in 1995 of the prosecution summary of the evidence in the Main Plot trial of 1603. This is not the first edition of Ralegh’s letters. Edward Edwards published 159 letters in his Life of Ralegh in 1868, but chiefly from the main ...”

“... We used to be told that Rome rose to imperial greatness through the native wit and lean frames of its farmer soldiers. And that if it wasn’t lead poisoning, orgies and overindulgence of every kind, it was race-mixing that brought about its fall, the descendants of Oriental slaves having weakened the native stock ...”

“... mass entertainment. His so-called Monster Meetings were carnivals as much as demonstrations, and mark the beginning of mass politics in the modern age. When he wasn’t haranguing thousands of small farmers about Catholic emancipation or the repeal of the Union, O’Connell practised as a barrister, the most theatrical of the professions. Tony Blair was also ...”

“... As a vision of heaven from the hollows of         ocean, that none but a god might see, Rose out of the silence of things unknown of                 a presence, a form, a might, And we heard as a prophet that hears God’s             message against him, and may not flee.Swinburne’s grandest theme of all, the ...”

“... late as 1912 the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal said that ‘men continued to see rouge as a mark of sex and sin.’ That same year, however, twenty thousand women, watched by half a million onlookers, marched in New York City for the right to vote: the leaders, who included some society ladies, wore bright red lipstick. The march was joined by Elizabeth ...”

“... of them as though they were still alive. As late as the autumn of 1992, when Middle England rose in revolt against the annihilation of the industry, the miner’s labour was identified so completely with the cause of manufacturing industry that a newly-elected Conservative government found itself in deep trouble with its own supporters when it tried to ...”

“... Peter Frampton as the headliner. The audience got restless and began heckling around the one-hour mark. Streisand and Kristofferson had a shouting match backstage while miked up; it was all over the news.Luckily for her, the studio didn’t like Pierson’s cut of the movie, so she was allowed to edit it herself. A team of editors worked round the clock while ...”

“... to succeed in prose’. He would succeed in both, and it’s hard to think of another writer who rose to fame as a novelist only to become famous a second time for his poetry. Couching it in these terms, though, downplays Hardy’s gravitation towards original weakness, unfresh starts, failure. Thinking about poetry on New Year’s Day 1879, he made a note ...”

“... body electric, the soul climactic: ‘I live in my body like a spirit in a cloud – a cloud of rose fire and voluptuous response.’ This feeling for the elemental is alive on page 1 – ‘my first memory is of a fire. I remember being thrown into the arms of a policeman from an upper window’ – and continues on page two with her invocation of ...”

“... among the Hawthornes, James’s tribute to the ‘domestic affections’ falls equally wide of the mark. Herbert does not refuse to believe in the Hawthornes’ tender feelings for one another, but he insists on the rage and terror that must have accompanied such tenderness, on the deep anxieties that, in his view, inevitably haunted the peaceful arrangements ...”

“... Put his graphic versions of his poems alongside printed versions and the reason becomes clear: O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. The poem gains when printed plain. The richly dressed text, to the frustration of the ...”

“... first person and based on the author’s own experience.’ That is astute but it oversteps the mark. After all, nearly all first novels are by writers about whom nothing is known. If they become famous it is because of their novels. Sassoon, on the other hand, was already famous. Everyone knew that he was the war hero who in 1917 had chucked his medals ...”