“... a group of servant children – ‘he’ is a young Black servant – taking the piss out of their masters and mistresses. It’s a kind of purposive fooling around that recalls the fun dances, which are also dangerous games, shared by the narrator and her friend Tracey in Swing Time (2016), or the goofing off that always says something about what it is to be ...”

“... on the supine condition of the British people, seemingly blind to the faults of their political masters. ‘As to that popular humour which is the medium we float in … it is far worse than I have ever known or could imagine it.’ In the face of public passivity, Burke concluded, even the most coherent opposition stood little chance of storming the ...”

“... his life. Frederick the Great died in 1786, to be succeeded by the notably unenlightened Frederick William II; and if the storming of the Bastille seemed to herald an enlightened age in France (‘I have seen the glory of the world,’ Kant said), the subsequent course of the Revolution was not so gratifying. A generation later, however, the amalgam of ...”

“... States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John ...”

“... pain of separation, particularly of children from their parents. In a poem on the appointment of William Legge, earl of Dartmouth, as secretary of state with responsibility for the American colonies, she recounts her abduction. If Dartmouth wonders why she loves freedom so deeply, he need look no further than her own past:I, young in life, by seeming cruel ...”

“... who rose to become an alderman of Stratford-upon-Avon. Both fathers were socially ambitious: William Middleton bought himself a coat of arms from the College of Heralds in 1568, thereby securing the all-important right for himself and his successors to style themselves ‘gentleman’ – a feat that John Shakespeare, with the help of his successful ...”

“... the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and ...”

“... the bulk of the lesser clergy) were Tory and consequendy not overly sympathetic to their masters in London. Cambridge, by contrast, was largely pro-government in this period, but – in the case of many of its fellows – out-of-step with the Court during the first half of George III’s reign. It required the French Revolution, which seemed to ...”

“... and so forth would fit his description very well. Although Meissonier’s first models were Dutch masters (Terborch and Metsu), the ‘indefinable hardness’ which Henry James, writing in 1872, identified does not come from them. Verisimilitude, James says, has become an end in itself: Meissonier understands to a buttonhole the uniform of the Grand Army. He ...”

“... Miller found quite unacceptable. And with a final glance back to the earliest of the sage’s masters, Chesterton, Miller declared that McLuhan ‘has accomplished the greatest paradox of all, creating the possibility of truth by shocking us all with a gigantic system of lies’. Miller’s book has the virtue of making his objections clear, but ...”

“... of Spion Kop. The most dangerous wars are successful ones. Victorious generals and their political masters prefer to delude themselves by taking the credit for winning, and so construct fictional accounts of the war, imputing rational calculation where none could have existed. Such is the hair’s breadth between disaster and triumph that spite, recrimination ...”

“... First: ‘The narrative of Robinson Crusoe is the account of how a single man gradually masters his own compulsions and extends his control over a huge, indifferent, even potentially hostile environment, learning to harness its inhuman forces and to put them to use for his own benefit. In this process, which is essentially that of rationalising the ...”

“... And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney. By 1931 he was already proclaiming, in a letter to William Soutar, that he was not the man to write ‘bairn rhymes or re-popularise Scots’, though he still thought ‘re-vaccination of the children with it’ an excellent idea. Some difficult years – in personal matters – and a change of orientation in ...”

“... being called upon to fill. The fragmentation of English culture will be healed, our educational masters believe, if all pupils can be taught and examined on the same literary texts, the same events from British history and the same rules of grammar. The fact that such a reactionary pedagogy is likely to undermine the popularity of English as a school and ...”

“... complete. As a Scottish pro-Hanoverian put it, ‘a handfull of the Scum of the Highlands are Masters of Scotland without burning almost a pound weight of powder.’O’Keeffe does not give much space to the march on London which followed, or to the Jacobites’ decision to turn back at Derby, not having found the recruits or support they had expected. He ...”