“... no decisive break from home and hearth, and yet with incremental assuredness and bravery, the young Hilda got herself out (with a timely, complicated assist from Pound, her importunate suitor whom she first met at the age of fifteen). She exited the rounds of upper-middle-class suburban life, the expectations of conventional marriage and motherhood. Her ...”

“... other litigation. One of the most interesting interviews recorded in Conspiracy of Silence is with Arthur Martin, the MI5 officer in charge of interrogating Blunt after his secret confession and the granting of immunity to him in 1964. Penrose and Freeman conjure up a bizarre portrait of Sir Anthony waking from a night with rough trade, spending the day at the ...”

“... a magnificent library, formed the principal nucleus of the Museum founded after his death in 1753. Arthur Macgregor, who has previously co-edited an important work on the history of museums, has gathered here a series of essays by current and former staff of the British and Natural History Museums, who use the 30 extant manuscript catalogues of Sloane’s ...”

“... who exploited those reports; close friends such as Ellen Nussey who defied Charlotte’s husband Arthur Nicholls and refused to burn the letters Charlotte sent her; even Charlotte herself, who, by reading her sister Emily’s poems, violated her privacy and thus allied herself with the intruders and the voyeurs. As a biographer and as a scholar of the ...”

“... pen or a paintbrush. Shortly after the example of Stein prompted her to write, Frances Stevens, a young American artist boarding with Loy, inspired her to try painting again. She was easily influenced by those around her. When Stevens became involved with the Futurist artists in Florence, and started to write manifestos, Loy followed suit with a manifesto of ...”

“... the occasional approach of ‘the ogres that were then still native to this land’. King Arthur is remembered not just as a legend but as someone it was possible to serve. Britons and Saxons live in separate communities but with a certain amount of overlap, any tensions kept below a simmer. You could describe events in the book as dreamlike, except ...”

“... historians in the United States than there are in France itself, and they are disproportionately young. Far more than ever before, it is now their historiographical world. But how far do they deserve it?There are perils in success. Highly fashionable as well as highly theoretical, French history can sometimes appear to outsiders to be weighed down and ...”

“... Saudi royal family, the role of intoxicants in the life of journalism was already on the decline. Young journalists, many of whom are women nowadays, are quite as likely to ask for a Perrier water or a white wine and soda as to order a large scotch or a pint of bitter. In some respects, this is no less important a change in the ambience of our trade than the ...”

“... a successful political career, securing election to Stormont as an independent Unionist. The young Ian Paisley used to travel to the parliament building in Nixon’s car, and he called Nixon ‘the most able and effective politician of his days’. The RUC-Loyalist murder gangs killed with gruesome theatricality. Crucifixes and rosary beads were draped ...”

“... a sexual, political or religious nature. A celebrated case at the turn of the century involved Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. After eight months of horse-ripping in Staffordshire, a series of anonymous letters directed police suspicion to a young Anglican clergyman named George Edalji, who was the son of a Hindu. Edalji was ...”

“... to rhetoric and the prosaic presentation has a special explanation. Victor Noir was a handsome young journalist shot after a quarrel by Prince Pierre Bonaparte. The Prince was acquitted of murder, but the Republicans ensured that the plain facts were recorded in bronze. The work has been taken as an extreme example of a tendency in 19th-century sculpture ...”

“... to the survival of the British nation,’ he had declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms … a nation which loses sight of its past cannot long expect to enjoy its future.’ A Tory politician asking us to include among ‘the national ...”

“... temptation to give this high romance a touch of the demotic: It was Christmas at Camelot – King Arthur’s court, where the great and the good of the land had gathered, all the righteous lords of the ranks of the Round Table quite properly carousing and revelling in pleasure. Compare O’Donoghue’s: It was Christmas at Camelot, and there was the king ...”

“... father. On Capri he was to see himself as Byron, D.H. Lawrence as Shelley and Francis Brett Young as a more retiring kind of Keats. And Lawrence was fascinated by him, found him sympathetic and good company, and made him the model in his story called ‘The man who loved islands’. The story could just as well be about Lawrence himself, and shows the ...”

“... Beneath their capacious skirts, Fanny and Stella were Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, two young cross-dressers who were put on trial in Westminster Hall in 1871. Cross-dressing was not a criminal offence, so the men were charged instead with outraging public decency. On the slightest of pretexts, the prosecution also threw in ‘the abominable crime of buggery’, along with conspiracy to incite others to do the same ...”