“... days); he knew his literary career wouldn’t have taken off but for the patronage of Shaw and Edward Thomas; he also knew some thought him overrated, a ‘nature poet’ who had earned that tag by sleeping under hedges rather than the quality of his verse: I hear men say: ‘This Davies has no depth, He writes of birds, of staring cows and sheep, And ...”

“... Cameron of Lochiel, whose decision, against his better judgment, to come out for Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 won the clans for the Pretender and doomed the ancient culture of the Highlands to extinction. ‘That gentleman, whose rent never exceeded five hundred pounds a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with ...”

“... heroine, Jennifer Hamilton (carried over from Emerson’s first novel, Second Sight), is a bright, young and pretty lady of letters. In the enjoyment of what is apparently the most enviable of modern lives, she is unexpectedly deserted by Martin, her Classics-don-at-London-University husband. A ‘black sea of despair’ engulfs Jennifer. She lies awake until ...”

“... Edward St Aubyn began writing his Patrick Melrose novels in 1988. He finished At Last, the fifth and supposedly final book in the series, late in 2010. St Aubyn is a terrific prose stylist and, end to end, these 800 or so pages, covering more than 40 years, add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour ...”

“... pretender, Perkin Warbeck, and removed the most dangerous alternative claimant to his throne, Edward, Earl of Warwick, the nephew of Edward IV in the male line. The king was poised to celebrate the marriage of his eldest son, Arthur, to the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon. The splendid pageants and tournaments that ...”

“... her age; they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the stage. Her performance as Portia in The Merchant of Venice drew her to the attention of Henry Irving, an emerging actor-manager ...”

“... and George Devine returned to acting. When they talked about forming a theatre company neither the young Tony Richardson nor the much older Devine knew what they wanted: ‘a new theatre – he didn’t know what. I wanted a new theatre too, and I didn’t know how,’ Richardson writes. But if the ambitious young Oxford ...”

“... country) of her own. The Furies can be read as another Portrait of a Lady, the representation of a young woman essentially on her own coping with the experience of existing in divided and distinguished worlds. Hobhouse’s Helen, like James’s Isabel Archer, is perpetually an alien. But there are big differences from the James novel, the most obvious being ...”

“... that some of them spoke no English. That was probably hardly true even then, and the government of Edward VI had no hesitation in massacring them for their obduracy. Early translations into major modern European languages followed, for diplomatic purposes, to demonstrate to potential Roman Catholic royal brides or their anxious advisers that the English ...”

“... Davie) to established talents in mid-career (Charles Tomlinson, Douglas Dunn) to new Best of Young British megastars (W.N. Herbert, Robert Crawford). But the fact relevant to Pound’s current standing is the one in Michael Alexander and James McGonigal’s Introduction: Sons of Ezra could not find a British publisher. Pounds have always been a dodgy ...”

“... Female characters are particularly prone to this schitzy reductionism: impossibly virtuous young heroines are made to co-exist, for example, with spectacularly sinister or depraved older women – grotesque harridans like Madame Duval in Frances Burney’s Evelina, or unpleasantly sexualised mother-figures like Madame Montoni in Radcliffe’s The ...”

“... that much of his output probably was as vulgar as his inter-war critics had claimed. Percy Young believed that the man and his music were inseparable, and presented Elgar as a ‘two-worldly character’, torn between the private poet of Worcestershire (who wrote great music), and the public poseur of London (who did not). In what remains the best and ...”

“... two great charms’. To judge from such opinions, contemporaries like Horace Walpole and Arthur Young would have regarded the present cult of the country house with amazement and incredulity. Moreover, the life which was actually lived within their walls emerges as far from beguiling. Most country houses were cold, gloomy, eerie, filthy, smelly and ...”

“... Eleven of Edward Moulton-Barrett’s dozen children survived to adulthood; and eight were left behind when the eldest escaped to Italy with Robert Browning in 1846 (two sons, including the father’s namesake, had died six years earlier). Moulton-Barrett did not attempt to hoard girl-children only, although the legend surrounding his daughter’s elopement has sometimes suggested that ...”

“... with: ‘both father and son were successful, self-made businessmen.’ Whether​ as a budding young entrepreneur or an aspiring young actor – or quite possibly a mix of the two – Shakespeare’s move to London was a key event in his life. We have no precise date for this; it’s perhaps unnecessary to think of it as ...”