“... in browsing through it derives from that. But Cotgrave can nod. He blandly translates as ‘Gentleman’ the Rabelaisian portmanteau word Janspillommes, which packs gentilhommes into gens-pille-hommes (‘pillagers of men’)! He did not feel obliged to list au-cul-passion –Rabelais’s fundamental deformation of occupation. Rabelais was a master of ...”

“... main influence on the boy came from the maternal side. Disdainful of his father, a simple country gentleman whose sole interests were hunting, shooting and fishing and the conversation that goes with these pursuits, the boy received the first impulses toward the study of art during his visits to Redmond Manor. Here his grandfather had assembled an excellent ...”

“... Rochester’s poems was made by Vivian de Sola Pinto for Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1953. In 1968 David Vieth produced an edition of 76 poems plus eight more listed as ‘Possibly by Rochester’; 75 of his attributions and usually his choices of copy-text were accepted by Keith Walker for his edition for Blackwell’s in 1984; to the 75 Walker added six new ...”

“... landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant lord’: ‘one that will do/To swell a progress, start a scene or two,/Advise the prince.’ Lord Morley never did become a royal ...”

“... dotted with crosses. ‘In the meantime,’ she remembered, ‘we were joined by an elderly gentleman, a younger female and her son.’ She describes her new acquaintance, who had failed so brilliantly to impress the German academy, as ‘a university professor named Walter Benjamin’. Perhaps it was Benjamin’s admirable unworldliness and civility ...”

“... competitive, though he usually managed to hide his competitiveness under the aplomb of a gentleman’.‘Ellmann loved anecdotes and good stories,’ Leader tells us, ‘and James Joyce is full of them.’ In fact, as he later recalled, the inadvertent prompt for the biography was an anecdote. Ellmann was working on his first book, a study of ...”

“... a young woman Betsy was so popular that her younger sister Marie took to sniffing the hats of gentleman visitors in the hall to work out who was paying court that evening. Betsy chose André, and is described as putting her hooks into him (‘mettre le grappin’). André’s parents weren’t keen, but she outmanoeuvred them, despite the difficulties of ...”

“... several of Arthur’s books and presented the musings of a wise patient wistful middle-aged gentleman called Geoffrey, who sate by his mullioned window and looked out on the gracious flowing meadow below … Once again my mother was helplessly giggling, but, as I read, I became aware of … something inclement in the room, and … saw a pained ...”

“... I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then inherits his fortune and lives happily ever after. ‘I don’t think so, do you darling?’ asks Mrs Chatto. ‘That’s not quite how we see ourselves at this stage in our career.’ The truth is I don’t have ...”

“... suffering.The BBC launched its Darwin season with Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, and what David Attenborough wanted us to understand was that ‘Darwin has shown us that we are not apart from the natural world – we do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its laws and processes, as are all other animals on earth to which indeed we are ...”

“... sexual adventure into two categories: some were seen to invite the lyre, the stance of nature’s gentleman, the man of feeling, poor but honest and passionately sincere, while others are sincerely aggressive and derisive. Both kinds are segregational, so to speak, in that they seem to belong to a separate sex of convivial males, and to share in the consensus ...”

“... him in 1545. A long run, on ground slippery with blood: how did Charles do it? His family had been gentleman merchants in Norfolk. They had served the dukes of Norfolk when the Mowbray family held that title. The Mowbray line came to an end in 1481, but before that Charles’s grandfather had married into the powerful Wingfield family and passed into the ...”

“... of the first beneficiaries, Macmillan paying the then record sum of £7000 for American rights to David Grieve in the (disappointed) hope of repeating the phenomenal success of her previous hit, Robert Elsmere. After the ending of the three-voller in 1894, and still more with the expansion of the market in the 1900s, the possibilities for large earnings from ...”

“... tasteless plutocrat at a villa he built in Mallorca, where according to his English biographer, David Bellos, in Romain Gary: A Tall Story (2010), ‘he mostly ignored the people he invited, prowled around looking glum and subjected everyone to the various strange diets he took up to keep himself in shape.’ By the 1970s he was unalterably fixed as a ...”

“... with a handful of miscellaneous spectators, often including a Jesuit priest, a retired military gentleman and his wife, and the wily Surrealist André Breton. Some of them took Kojève out for dinner afterwards, so he must have been well liked. But he wanted to reach a larger public, and early in 1939 he published a sample in the prestigious literary review ...”