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“... to make anachronistic judgments and ask anachronistic questions is hard to avoid. Why didn’t Thomas Mann come out? Why didn’t Forster publish Maurice in 1914, when he wrote it? Why didn’t the American critic F.O. Matthiessen write a history of gay American writing? How come Lionel Trilling didn’t realise that Forster was gay? And why are gay lives ...”

“... a final jump – through the paper hoop of Norman Mailer’s ‘faction’ – into the company of Thomas Pynchon and Thomas Berger. One of his propositions is that ‘as far as the intellectuals are concerned, the prophecy that a literature of the West would emerge to liberate America from European and ...”

“... prose. For learned disputes had gentlemanly antecedents, and so had learned fabrications; even Thomas Warton was guilty, and he was the author of the standard History of English Poetry, a work some Shakespeare hunters saw as a model for their much desired history of English drama. The deceits practised by the 19th-century forgers were more ...”

“... and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923) had two virtues and one substantial demerit. The virtues were a carefully written introduction by Joseph Conrad, which treated Crane as a major writer, and Beer’s lively and vigorous ...”

“... aristocratic houses, but was now adapted by the chattering classes as a room for secluded leisure. Thomas Mower’s parlour contained a set of bells that were played with a mallet, while that of Matthew Phelips, a former mayor of London, was bedecked with cushions (eight with griffons, seven with lions), painted hangings, benches, a turned chair and an ...”

“... the golden dolly league in Regency London was the Coutts squad: the widow and three daughters of Thomas Coutts the banker. All were flush with cash from his gigantic fortune (probably well over a million) and all married aristocrats. The widow, 45 at her husband’s death, was perhaps no longer a dolly; but no dolly came more golden. She’d inherited most ...”

“... the Interregnum in 1660, Pericles was the first Shakespeare play to be performed, with a youthful Thomas Betterton, aged 25, celebrated in the title role at the Phoenix in Drury Lane. In fact Pericles was more than simply popular: the play became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor ...”

“... frequently during his professorial year in America in 1932-33 was not Browning, or even Dante, but Edward Lear. Lear’s genius for names – from the Quangle Wangle to the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò – had captivated Eliot from childhood, and he had imitated Lear in his pencil-written magazine of 1899, the Fireside. The ten-year-old Eliot had made up distinctive ...”

“... MP could regard as recent, as well as familiar. It is particularly interesting to find in Thomas Starkey an idea be loved of John Pym – that of a standing committee in which the authority of a Parliament could reside during the time between sessions. Perhaps Dr Guy’s most vital contribution to the compatibility of the 16th and 17th centuries is ...”

“... and Americans, with enormous (but not always respectable) riches, who found an admirer in Edward VII and an outspoken critic in H.G. Wells. Faced with such varied material, Aslet sorts his houses into two basic types: the social and the romantic. The social house was built on the grandest of scales for the richest of the rich: some patricians, most ...”

“... another three volumes followed, spanning the decade from the death of Victoria to the demise of Edward VII. Although he remained a regular and prolific contributor, Stephen had long since abandoned his editorial connection with the scheme. For an enterprise initially conceived with almost jaunty vagueness (‘I have been thinking a great deal,’ he ...”

“... blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) indicates that many scholars, herbicide to hand, regard Marxist historiography as a menace. Professor J.H. Hexter’s recent ad hominem assault on Christopher Hill’s scholarly integrity seems to ...”

“... lots of space to the most outrageous ones. By contrast, he offers only a fleeting discussion of Edward Said and the literature surrounding Orientalism. He explains that his perspective differs from the Said school because he sees it as the political historian’s task ‘to make distinctions across time, whereas many of these works, from Said onwards, have ...”

“... tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the royal trumpeter; Edward Swarthye, the trusted upper servant of a leading Gloucestershire landowner; Cattelena, an independent Black ‘singlewoman’ living with her cow in the village of Almondsbury, near Bristol; Reasonable Blackman (or Blakemore), a successful silk-weaver in ...”

“... featured in and fed material to Private Eye. Introduced in his youth to Fitzrovia, he knew Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Julian Maclaren-Ross, and wrote with sufficient extra-historical purchase to make it into Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature (to his immoderate delight). His memoirs were a Book at Bedtime. He received the ...”