“... Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards Elizabeth, mindful of the role history may have in store for her. Shardlake is retained as one of her lawyers. Now 47, he is lonely, world-weary, and bored of drawing up conveyances and wills (perhaps as Sansom was before he packed in the law). He clings fondly to the idea of the commonwealth, defined ...”

“... By ‘shorts’ she’s probably not thinking of him dressed as a Hitler Youth but Kempowski may have been, if only as a naughty joke. Grass didn’t own up to his Nazi past until 2006 and even his biographer claimed to know nothing about it. Kempowski can’t have known about it till then either but in the interview he gave shortly before his ...”

“... On its inside wall was a hand-painted scroll featuring the famous couplet from ‘To a Louse’ by Robert Burns: ‘O wad some power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us.’The documents Barr and Painter rescued from the Broadway are now in the Moving Image Archive in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall, once the home of the city’s annual carnival and ...”

“... for a few hundred feet? How do you explain the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth, and the American Robert Goddard, who pursued the mad ambition of space with rockets that lifted themselves only a few yards, before collapsing under their own contradictions? Even more remarkable are the interlinked stories of the two men who actually took humans into ...”

“... take in these new opportunities to taste ‘the pleasures of the imagination’. Georgian England may now, in our culture’s memory, be associated with ‘order, stability and decorum’, but ‘contemporaries saw their culture as modern, not traditional, an indication that their society and way of life was changing. It was its dynamism, variety and ...”

“... with (and even now to require) active state intervention, social reform and higher taxes. Robert Morier even sought to reconcile Free Trade with Empire (an Empire bound together by ties of sentiment and affection rather than by material economic interests). Thus reinvigorated, it had no difficulty in seeing off the fair trade and bimetallist ...”

“... length and breadth of the British feminist pedigree. British feminist effort between 1860 and 1914 may sometimes seem fragmented, she says, but in reality it concentrated fire from several directions on the same target – male exploitation of the female sex – and gained force from the many-sidedness of its approach. This aspect of Kent’s argument is less ...”

“... The husband represents the conjugal union. He is also personally liable for his own acts whatever may be the system under which the matrimonial property is held. For Dickinson, our lives are Swiss, like watches or legal codes. Everything is staked out for us in the high-precision language of legal draughtsmanship and cultural engineering. According to ...”

“... lure to biographers – judging by his bibliography, Shepherd’s is the tenth so far, which may be a record for a living politician. (Powell himself dismisses all notion of writing his memoirs – ‘like a dog returning to its own vomit’.) Shepherd has included a large proportion of the better known Powell stories, though he omits two of my ...”

“... inconsistent with the migrants’ own desires’. Similarly, the folklorists Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin, sent west under the aegis of Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress to record what might be left of the migrants’ musical lore, paid no attention to what the Okies – by now into commercialised country and western music – wanted to hear, play ...”

“... Rakosi (another Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a diverse lot, although most of them incorporated key elements of the ...”

“... The Nemesis of Faith (1849) by his disciple and too frank biographer J.A. Froude to Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). The German setting and European (and occasionally Asian and African) frame of reference seem to make this a cosmopolitan rather than an English or Scottish text. It was translated into Dutch in 1880 and into German and Polish in ...”

“... Noise and Bustle you can, to make the whole Town ring of you if possible: So that every one in it may know, that there is in Being, and here in Town too, such a Physician’. One way to make such a noise was to be seen in the fastest and most fashionable medical and literary circles, hoping for a reflected aura, or, at least, for crumbs of patronage to fall ...”

“... of their pirouettes or the fact that they are silently upheld? Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a colour, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm. He goes on to set out his ambition ‘to ...”

“... The previous year, her reception in Europe had been just as harsh. ‘As to her talents we may safely assert she never possessed any,’ the critic from the Sunday Times wrote. ‘Lola Montez has had a more complete fiasco than it is possible to imagine,’ a Belgian critic reported, going on to say that while she had never been blessed with any ...”