“... taken the Commons by storm with his dazzling debating skills, and at 24 he was a Treasury lord in North’s ministry. It went to his head. ‘In an excess of vanity and presumption,’ Horace Walpole remarked, he acted as the leader of a party, ‘his arrogance, loquacity and intempernace raising him the enemies of a minister before he had acquired the power ...”

“... a speech from the throne commending the terms of the peace. In issue no. 45 of his periodical the North Briton, Wilkes attacked the effrontery of the prime minister, George Grenville, in obliging the king to speak in praise of a shameful treaty, though in fact the sentiments in the speech were well known to be those of George III himself. Where the speech ...”

“... A busy time in the courts brought a modest prosperity, a house in the suburbs and a partner, Elizabeth Darbyshire, whom he later married. Politics never lost its appeal, however. Radical movements were split over the degree of accommodation that should be reached with the progressive end of the mainstream. Jones favoured reconciliation with the John ...”

“... Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina. His reverence for the Virgin folded easily into his adoration of Hollywood’s golden age stars. But he also became something of a star himself. His early poems were inspired by queer desire and systematic derangement achieved through ...”

“... in Lords of the Lebanese Marches, based on field work he conducted in a Sunni Muslim rural area of North Lebanon during the early Seventies, before the recent civil war. This beautifully written book describes the culture of masculinity in its multiple refractions through violence and narrative, joking and play, a world where status and power are organised ...”

“... of England’s most disastrous kings’). Roberts tells us with his trademark thump that now Elizabeth II has allowed more than 200,000 pages of the Georgian Archives at Windsor to be published – 85 per cent of them for the first time – ‘it is at last possible to show that every single word quoted above about George III is completely ...”

“... 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth Young – Bruehl’s lengthy and thorough biography, and in Bhikhu Parekh’s Hannah Arendt Made Simple, is this: how much of the Sixties survives to the Eighties? She comes across, certainly, as a good egg. She looks out of the back cover of Dr ...”

“... the scene. Land-based lighthouses offer more graphic potential and seemingly generate less unease. North Foreland, which featured in the advertising campaign ‘You Can Be Sure of Shell’ in the 1930s, was shown close up, from the landward side, in Elwin Hawthorne’s design, but it has some of the brooding, uninviting quality that pervades the nearly ...”

“... acknowledges, part of it collapsed into the river in the early 1800s. There was arable land to its north and east, so settlers could have moved away from the river and ‘the diseased swamps that would make New Orleans the great necropolis of North America’. And yet, as Powell concedes, this cramped geography would force ...”

“... means. White girls look at meconstantly. DMX never seems to be screaming.The underground heads north on my playlistswhile an old poster peels away from the wall.I’m beside myself almost always: A-side, B-side.FUBU (a clothing line) means ‘For Us, By Us’. It summons up a culture of Black solidarity that Charleston associates with Chicago’s South ...”

“... of Sydney Harbour Bridge. She went on to live on three other continents: Asia, Europe and North America. As is sometimes the way with writers whose biographies are yet to be written (Brigitta Olubas is on the case), information about Hazzard’s life is often tinged with exoticism. She was a teenage spy in Hong Kong after the Second World War; in the ...”

“... their talents; ‘The Psychopathology of the Sofa’ is the subtitle. A Butterfly Under a Stone by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She and her sisters, unknown to her father, brothers and later, her husband, befriended a poor girl dying of tuberculosis in ‘The Rookeries’, which were, after all, not a mile from their house. This fine and compassionate novel was ...”

“... goose-pimpling pause: ‘I’ve always thought that Gudrun was, well, the vasectomy queen of the North.’ Angela shot straight. She saw clearly and she spoke up, and this is what, more than anything else, I admired about her. When Wise Children was published last June, she was widely and rightly praised for its ingenuities: for dramatically depicting the ...”

“... air and open road (‘going one knows not where’) literature of all kinds: in the summer of 1907 Elizabeth von Arnim took a large party, including E.M. Forster, through Sussex by caravan, while the Neo-Pagans were camping out in the New Forest. Even so, with the rent of his cottage ‘a quarterly worry’, Edward Thomas had to make ends meet with the ...”

“... low Diana had sunk that night in Paris as she left the Ritz: In August most upscale Parisians head north to Deauville for the polo and the racing or to the cool woods of their country estates in the Loire or Bordeaux … Paris’s most prestigious hotel at that time of the year is crawling with camera-toting tourists and rubber-neckers. At the end of the ...”