“... Rossetti met her first love. She was not yet 18 when Gabriel’s friend and fellow art student James Collinson took an interest in her. A quiet, meek little chap from a philistine Midlands family, he was to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for a while, hover between Anglicanism and Catholicism, and paint rather good genre pictures, the chief of ...”

“... dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour was a baronetcy conferred by James I in 1622, largely to raise revenue; the first baronet must have been a disappointment in that regard, as he went to prison for debt in 1629 and again in 1638. His son and heir was imprisoned for political reasons in 1646, and pardoned in 1651. The third ...”

“... to sift through Gordon’s many pages for comments that might prove useful.According to Katherine Scott, one of O’Connor’s schoolteachers, ‘it was obvious that she was a genius. Warped, but a genius all the same.’ Critics have tended to seize on biographical details, portraying her as a crackpot visionary from the Bible Belt. Time magazine’s review ...”

“... first silenced the monster, thus removing the formal characteristic of a dialogue. On these points James Whale’s film of 1931 follows Peake’s stage version, so that Boris Karloff’s monster, the definitive realisation, exacts emotions of terror and pity but not of social indignation. The filmgoer who consults Mary Shelley’s text in a modern reprint will ...”

“... after the Civil War, while Europe had to wait for the industrial impetus of the 1914 conflict. As Scott Fitzgerald wisely observed, culture follows money, so by the time he was enjoying the Twenties and dunking Zelda in the Plaza fountain New York was where it was at. Manhattan is not New York, and New York, as people fall asleep telling you, is not ...”

“... did nothing to help Byron’s character; but he could hardly have been Byron without it. Scott astutely thought him ‘a patrician on principle’: the business of being important was crucially important to the business of being Byron. His snobbery was mostly venial. He liked the idea of his mother’s family more than his father’s because of its ...”

“... Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s ethereal blonde girlfriend, who would haunt him as Kim Novak haunts James Stewart in Vertigo; The Unmasking of Green Goblins 1, 2, and 3 (a shock each time); The Marriage of Aunt May to Doctor Octopus (an odious villain) – were well behind him. And Peter Parker had settled for what seemed to us a second-best girlfriend, the ...”

“... of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby estate in Teesdale, thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next came a beautiful lake at Killarney which turned out to be called the Meeting of the Waters; again, it’s believed, at ...”

“... had something of her own range of knowledge, and she seems to ignore his views, so I may speak up. C.S. Lewis, in the first chapter of his survey of English 16th-century literature (1954), said that earlier writers had treated magic as fanciful and remote, but in this period they felt it might be going on in the next street; and one reason was a thing they ...”

“... body which knit together are love.’ ‘Love is the central motif of non-violence,’ the Rev. James Lawson told the founding meeting of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) in Greensboro, North Carolina on 15 April 1960. ‘It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring ...”

“... of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both ...”

“... seductively in his recent memoir, Between the World and Me. Formally modelled on the first part of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the book is addressed to Coates’s teenage son, Samori, on the occasion of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian ...”

“... of references’ without which ‘it is spurious to discuss a long poem like In Memoriam James Joyce’. This sort of background work ought to be done and she seems well-equipped to do it. Harvey Oxenhorn’s book is of a different character. It is a critical assessment of the kind which used to be done summarily in an essay but which modern academic ...”

“... Witch Wood (1927) was his favourite – and his status as a Scottish monument, a descendant of Scott and Stevenson. There’s nothing fanciful about this – Janet Adam Smith reported that Clement Attlee pointed out to her a borrowing from Kidnapped in The Thirty-Nine Steps – and if he had had a slightly different temperament Buchan might have become a ...”

“... however, to give up the case or its nefarious methods. It managed to secure a precedent when James Williams, a Portsmouth bookseller, was tried for selling cheap reproductions of satires by Hone, and sentenced to a heavy fine and a year’s imprisonment. Hone discovered that Williams, a strong supporter of the government, had agreed to act as a ...”