“... to say nothing of the tortuosity of the style’), it made him realise ‘the English richness of George Eliot’ and ‘the superiority of English culture and the English mind to the French’. In this he was expressing New England’s special sense of the English as well as of the French. He moved to London at the end of 1876, and installed himself at once ...”

“... executor to deflect most of the money away from the obvious political uses that had been intended. George Bernard Shaw’s indignant account of a subsequent meeting of the Fabian executive, at which Webb ‘hinted that the bequest had been left to him to dispose of as he thought fit, and that the executive had nothing to do with it’, was not just Shavian ...”

“... pioneering Thesaurus of the Northern languages, but again did not pick up popularity till after Walter Scott. ‘Valkyries’ were introduced to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens ...”

“... presented devolution as a plan to secure the Union; put another way, in the partisan words of George Robertson, it would ‘kill nationalism stone-dead’. However, others begged to differ. Not only the Tories, but also Labour’s open devo-sceptic, Tam Dalyell, contended that home rule and the resulting potential for friction between Edinburgh and ...”

“... black businesses were owned by West Indians. In 1952, however, when Congress passed the McCarran Walter Act restricting migration, prospective migrants to the US were obliged to reconsider. The United Kingdom, where some of their kin had already settled, was an obvious choice. Officially, 492 West Indians, the majority of them Jamaican men with an average ...”

“... say ‘shibboleth’ properly. The rebels of 1381 carried banners displaying the cross of St George, only recently appointed patron saint of England.The fate of the Flemings was remembered by Chaucer when he wrote ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ only a few years later. The priest says of a noisy fox hunt: ‘Jack Straw and his men/Never shouted half so ...”

“... and one-time day labourer, had accumulated a quarter of a million by the time he died in 1835. George Hammond, a cheesemonger whose assets were probated in 1839 at £140,000, had begun as a shopboy. If you had a lot of money, the secret of dying rich lay of course in the art of staying rich. This meant not only avoiding obvious perils – like those junk ...”

“... city hall. In Munich, Lee Miller was photographed soaping herself in Hitler’s bath. Walter Sanders caught the wife and daughter of an American soldier drinking tea in a luxurious dining car, looking out at the train next to them, in which DPs were squashed into boxcars. Sollors has unearthed interesting and troubling material about the ...”

“... zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, and moving into the Altenburg Palace on the outskirts of town; Thackeray, George Eliot, Smetana, Berlioz and Wagner all visited. Liszt engaged better musicians, improved the repertory, old and new, and included his own compositions. He put Weimar back on the cultural map, but didn’t get the support he hoped for from the court. He ...”

“... yawns, they mostly lost their heads, like the distinguished (‘wit, raconteur and’) designer George Nelson in four pages of ad hominem bad temper in the AIA Journal for December last. Part of that ill-tempered display, however, might be due to Nelson recognising some of Wolfe’s snide stories as ultimately his own, for Nelson, along with Peter ...”

“... theatrical, feminine mother who bore seven children, read romantic fiction – including Sir Walter Scott – and dominated her family. There seems to have been much struggle against her daughter’s adolescent ‘William Cather Jr’ role: Willa wanted none of the Southern lady posture and decorum. But the mature Cather came to acccept the unspoken bond ...”

“... but depriving them of rights was not seriously discussed. Glover takes as his starting point George Eliot’s sympathetic and complex treatment of the mid-Victorian dilemmas of Jewish existence in Daniel Deronda (1876), which he describes as ‘the single most influential English work of fiction about Jews, Judaism and modernity in the decade immediately ...”

“... submissions to it, make an edifying contrast both with earlier state trials, such as that of Sir Walter Raleigh, and with the sanguinary revenge which followed the Restoration. Cooke, who was born in 1608 into a modest Leicestershire farming family and had established a practice at the Bar by hard work and ability (his clients included Fairfax and ...”

“... some access to a literary community: John Milton wrote a sonnet to her sister; the romance writer George Pettie was a relation of her mother’s; and, since her manuscripts were first discovered in a library in Leeds in the mid-1990s, some scholars have argued that her work may have influenced Andrew Marvell. In more than half of her poems, Pulter uses ...”

“... possession was never just the mixture of theatre and contrivance depicted by philistines like Walter Bagehot. It was more like an identity-fabric which, in the odd conditions of Empire-Britain, stood in for other forms of nationalism. With only a few years of hindsight it is obvious how such a moral structure can vanish far more utterly than places and ...”