“... ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far more often, we must apply our pre-fabricated theories about ...”

“... that are all dead letter, not living spirit. This is Hazlitt’s point in a little-noticed passage in an essay called ‘Whether genius is conscious of its powers’, where he argues that ‘the stimulus of writing is like the stimulus of intoxication’: ‘While we are engaged in any work, we are thinking of the subject, and cannot stop to admire ...”

“... I think – unfortunately I no longer possess a copy but had a small part in it at school – the passage: ‘Man, like a pebble on a glacier, moves imperceptibly but always down.’ A.P. Herbert was not being serious, of course, but his words apply to some, perhaps most, of us, mentally, morally and physically as we grow older. Where, however, they are most ...”

“... him, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference’. Joyce recalled the passage, then already famous, in which Walter Pater completed his ‘imaginary portrait’ of Watteau: ‘He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.’ Swaying to ...”

“... of the Prime Minister’s.’ Stephen is on the Parmenter Committee because his former publisher, Charles Darke, is now a junior minister in the government and a pet concern of the Prime Minister’s. Two years previously, Stephen’s three-year-old daughter Kate was abducted in a supermarket, and he is still in a state of shock. At home, he sits in front of ...”

“... churches. One would hardly gather from his letters to them – or to close English friends like Charles Milnes Gaskell, Sir Robert Cuncliffe and Cecil Spring Rice – that the gamut of writers he casually and aptly quoted or alluded to seriously engaged him. Not one letter contains an extended passage on a literary ...”

“... to the press in late 1647. One of its latest datable poems was written in August that year, when Charles I was negotiating to make peace with Parliament and was reconstructing a household of musicians and courtiers at Hampton Court. Negotiations broke down, and in November the king fled. By then Hesperides – which might partly have been designed as a bid ...”

“... In this celebration of a possible Good Imperialist (good beyond the inherent virtues of failure), Charles Nicholl unearths more detail and offers more seductive speculation than any previous writer. With the vigorous Return of the Subject that besets many contemporary historians, he also can’t resist elbowing to the forefront with a Channel 4 expedition to ...”

“... the hypothesis that the older generation, like the immigrant and peasant workers, were birds of passage in their labour market, putting up with low pay because they could count on a husband’s wage as well, and because they could adapt the ease of entry into low-skill jobs to their own purposes, leaving work when children came along, taking it up again ...”

“... George Gissing was convinced that the year 1900 would make all the difference. Writing his study of Charles Dickens in the late 1890s, he refers to his own generation as those ‘upon whom the new centurys breaking’. And one of the things the new century would bring was the New Woman. To an extent, of course, as Gissing realised, she had already arrived ...”

“... male portraits such as Man with a Glove, Tommaso Mosti or The Young Englishman, turns out to be a passage in Rona Goffen’s Titian’s Women (1997) claiming that these portraits ‘represent sexual accessibility, as though these men were available for (male or female) delectation’. Hale is uncertain. ‘There is no way of proving or disproving the ...”

“... Park fell into disuse, and Oliver Cromwell’s wife kept a dairy there. After the Restoration, Charles II set about renovating St James’s Park, filling it with parrots, partridges, pheasants and rabbits, as well as guinea fowl, monkeys and ‘the handsomest deer’. To keep the park full of such deer, he decreed that two of the handsomest be sent to ...”

“... When​ the 22-year-old Charles Darwin joined HMS Beagle in 1831 he took a copy of Paradise Lost with him, and over the next five years he read it many times, in Brazil, Patagonia, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and Mauritius. As the ship’s naturalist he sent commentaries and specimens back to colleagues in London, who soon came to see him not as a dilettante but an extremely acute observer ...”

“... soil. Churchill was enraged by what he saw as the stupidity of this position. He was not alone. Charles Darnley Stuart Stephens, who had served in the Lagos police and commanded a battalion of British Nigerians some forty years earlier, wrote in the English Review in 1916 recommending the deployment of armed African regiments. He favoured Nigerians for ...”

“... on colonial infrastructure for access. The networks of imperial power granted fieldworkers safe passage among remote peoples and – after a hard day’s work interviewing people about what they ate for dinner or whose cousin was whose – a gin and tonic on the local district officer’s veranda. The anthropologists took up their posts in universities, the ...”