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“... James Wilcox’s charming comedy is set in rural Louisiana, among people who read the Bible in an engagingly amateurish way, associating religion with the conventions about drinking and dancing enforced by their anxious parents, and sometimes tempted to ‘modernise’ their lives, while still seeking God’s guidance ...”

“... Fat arse and big thighs never assist horsemanship’ was the verdict of General Sir William Furse who watched the young Edmund Allenby riding at Staff College in 1896-7. Six foot, two inches tall, with a 44-inch chest and a hearty appetite for food and drink, Allenby dominated man and horse alike by brute size ...”

“... gauged by the successive and overlapping careers of three 16th-century Scottish clergymen called William Chisholm. All three in turn exercised episcopal jurisdiction in the diocese of Dunblane; no need to ask if they were by any chance related. They were Scottish noblemen, and that’s what medieval Scottish noblemen did: pass on large quantities of church ...”

“... its history, the directorship of Sydney Cockerell from 1908 to 1937. Cockerell, who followed M.R. James in the post, had been library cataloguer and acquisitions assistant to William Morris during the 1890s, and his taste was formed by Morris and Ruskin and their circles. He seems to have been relentlessly ...”

“... What strikes one about the garden at Lamb House, as redesigned by Henry James, is that it possesses all the ingredients of an old-English garden, yet the impression it makes is American. It seems on principle to want to do without mystery, even the mild mysteries beloved of English gardening-folk. In some indefinable way it is a public garden ...”

“... found the core of his talent. It all started with a spirited exchange in print with Henry James. In September 1884, when Stevenson was new to that oasis of convalescents, he picked up a copy of Longman’s Magazine, which carried James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. He knew ...”

“... among ‘members unlimited’. The loyalist reaction against this popular agitation was severe. William Pitt the Younger’s government legislated against ‘seditious’ meetings and writings, and imprisoned leaders of reform societies and printers of the radical press. ‘Church and King’ was the watchword of magistrates and manufacturers, who employed ...”

“... with verve and elegance. Perhaps, she thinks, it is all the fault of the old maestro Henry James. As a critic, and even more as a practitioner, he got the public used to the doctrine of the novel as fine art, ‘a creation beyond paraphrase or reduction’. In James’s novels, the characters are typically made to ...”

“... masterless man.’ Others prefer the judgment of the Australian judge and historian James Spigelman: Coke’s mind ‘was so narrow and unsubtle, so incapable of jettisoning detail, so often inconsistent, that no one has ever speculated that he wrote the works of Shakespeare’. That perverse distinction has of course been conferred on Coke’s ...”

“... and Elizabeth Smart for George Barker, while Mary Godwin and Shelley shadow the literary love of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, W.B. and Georgie Yeats all get chapters to themselves. Since some of her cases come close to the pathological, and most are ...”

“... It was said of Lord Byron that he was more proud of his Norman ancestors who had accompanied William the Conqueror in the invasion of England than of having written famed works. The name de Burun, not yet Anglicised, was inscribed in the Domesday book. Looking back, I feel a pride akin to that in having flown and fought along the Yalu. As there are love ...”

“... or an accident or a coincidence. But what if something rather like that happens again? What if William McRae, a radical Glasgow solicitor, and a prominent objector to the dumping of nuclear waste in the Galloway hills, is found shot dead in his car with the revolver some twenty yards away in a stream? Are we to assume, as the authorities in Scotland ...”

“... these texts are read only as period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context. Salzman’s aim was simply ‘to solve some of the problems raised by the theoretically informed return to history in Renaissance/early ...”

“... are just straight portraits – and good ones.This skill with likeness is one thing revealed by James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, at Tate Britain until 2 September – the inclusion of formal portraits of his victims by other hands makes it possible to see exactly how he tweaked appearance. Another is his ability as an engraver. There are passages of ...”

“... their wealth; Protestantism was the badge of the Ascendancy. At 28 she married a neighbour, Sir William Gregory, 35 years her senior. Gregory had been at Harrow with Trollope, who, as a schoolboy, was thought grubby and generally pretty hopeless, but they remained friends, and Phineas Finn is said to be partly based on Sir ...”