“... or 1826 until her departure in 1838, tales circulated of her supposed affairs with the journalists William Jerdan and William Maginn, and the painter Daniel Maclise. Though the rumours put an end to her engagement to John Forster in 1835, nothing surfaced that she and her friends could not refute or explain away, and once ...”

“... Edward the Confessor built the first abbey, next to his palace at Westminster, in 1042, and William the Conqueror became the first king to be crowned in it, on Christmas Day 1066. Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III ...”

“... father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right? For more than half a century, he supplied a gloss of coherence and glamour to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his mid-Atlantic drawl and slaloming locutions, he held out the suggestion ...”

“... North-West. They had been running Westmorland like a giant pocket borough since the heyday of Sir James (‘Wicked Jimmy’) Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale: a man Thomas De Quincey called ‘a true Feudal Chieftain’, notorious for his ‘gloomy temper and habits of oppression’. Wicked Jimmy went to a better (or worse) place in 1802, at which point the ...”

“... On 23 January 1894, Henry James entered in his notebook two stories told to him by Lady Gregory, whom he had met first in Rome 15 years earlier. She had given one of them to him, he wrote, as a plot, and ‘saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself’. ‘At any rate,’ he went on, ‘Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue ...”

“... christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the ...”

“... except as an ironic jab. Few poetic terms have shifted in significance so much. When, around 1500, William Dunbar called a rival Scottish poet an ‘Iersche brybour baird’, each word was a studied insult. ‘Iersche’ (Gaelic) was barbarous to Dunbar’s Lowland ear; a ‘brybour’ was a vagabond; a ‘baird’ was a limited sub-poet, not a ‘makar’. A ...”

“... study of Aristotle’s phronesis led the poet back towards a native American pragmatism, recalling William James at Harvard but also providing critical anticipations of Richard Rorty. The truth is no doubt messier than these formulations suggest – say, that Eliot after a time was content to assimilate rather than extend his philosophical learning, but ...”

“... explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with singular modesty and generosity, has been to draw their conclusions together and to set them in perspective. But the findings which count for most are the author’s own. To the non-specialist ...”

“... James Hunter​ ’s work has analysed with utter thoroughness the culture of the Highlands and the diaspora that was forced on it. In his latest book, Set Adrift upon the World, he doesn’t try to describe, in a novelist’s or a journalist’s way, how individuals suffered and grieved and retaliated. Rather, he lays out the way systematic dispossession was managed, legally, by the class who engineered the process and who did so for their own gain ...”

“... feelings of hope and opportunity for Sansom, feelings which he associates with his baby. He quotes William Trevor – ‘The map of Ireland is not unlike a sleeping infant’ – as he compares his newborn’s tidy proportions with the ‘faltering outline’ of his own body: ‘I am coming to resemble the shape of mainland Britain.’ But there are other ...”

“... the attic and sees ‘Fleur and Alan coming together, Henry and Ingrid under pressure, Simona and William falling apart’. Her novel will be based on their pillow talk. In the second week of the holiday she suffers a reverse. The cameras are discovered and an angry guest contacts the press. A tell-all story – headlined ‘BIG SISTER’ – appears in the ...”

“... out for Belfast via the small Shropshire town of Wem. Why Wem? Well, I’m working on a book about William Hazlitt, and feel the need to walk some of the ground he trod. His father, the Reverend William Hazlitt, ministered to a small ‘decayed’ Presbyterian congregation here. Hazlitt spent part of his childhood and youth ...”

“... and that the French Revolution was the fulfilment of the prophecy of Revelation. One example is William Sharp, known alike for his skill as an engraver and his extreme credulity. Even Blake was sceptical of his fervent devotion to Richard Brothers, the self-appointed Prince of the Hebrews and Nephew of the Almighty, and to Joanna Southcott, the putative ...”

“... Year, my ignorance of the turf was such that when one of my salesmen suggested that the bookmaker William Hill might send out a leaflet, I had to inquire who Mr Hill was. I tracked him down, and although he declined a leaflet, he ordered fifty thousand copies of the book. That was a bonanza year. Marie Stopes was my first encounter with an egocentric ...”