“... de Caus at the Jacobean court encouraged the fashion for fancifully ornamented damp underground chambers that had been sweeping Italy since the 1560s. While the Stuarts and the Russells were commissioning elaborately theatrical grottoes at Greenwich Palace, Richmond Palace, Woburn Abbey and Somerset House, Shakespeare’s characters were still speaking only ...”

“... superstition and intolerance.In March 1706, in the midst of the War of the Spanish Succession, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, wrote excitedly to the Swiss biblical scholar Jean Le Clerc. ‘There is,’ he declared, ‘a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, upon ...”

“... coherence. It’s possibly true of, say, Philip Roth, from Goodbye, Columbus to Nemesis, but Anthony Burgess? If you like A Clockwork Orange you’ll love Inside Mr Enderby? Or Margaret Atwood? If you like The Handmaid’s Tale you’ll love Alias Grace? With Banks, you knew what you were getting (and the excellent old Abacus black and white book jackets ...”

“... of the big production number – altarpieces, history paintings, group portraits in council chambers – were either unavailable or compromised. Even in France, where masterpieces of exhibition painting (like those by Géricault, Delacroix and Courbet) had been produced well into the 19th century, it was the room pictures of the Impressionists and ...”

“... Arabic’. Glyn’s autobiography appeared in 1936. An excellent life by her grandson, Anthony Glyn, was published in 1955, revised in 1988. Why, then, another biography? Joan Hardwick, author of An Immodest Violet (1990), a study of Violet Hunt (whose novels included – yes – The Tiger Skin), evidently felt irresistibly drawn to another ...”

“... takes forty minutes. Then he packs the nose and throat with cotton wool, drains liquid from the chambers of the heart, punctures internal organs to stop them swelling with gas and fills the stomach with a hardening compound. The process is grisly, the results miraculous: the body looks composed, its pallid skin flushed pink.Embalming has a long history. The ...”

“... who ‘marched in battle-gear’ – and her political and dynastic connections. Her father, Sir Anthony Cooke, had been tutor to Edward VI; her eldest sister, Mildred, was married to the all-powerful Lord Treasurer, Burghley; another sister, Anne, was the wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper. Elizabeth was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most ...”

“... Joseph Sturge, William Morgan and John Angell James); major cultural figures such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, all of whom took part in the public debate about the events in Jamaica; as well as officers, scribes, landowners, creolised whites, metropolitan intellectuals. Like her Baptist missionaries, they all became ...”

“... in A Whistling Woman’s own symbolic repertoire. (As she did in Babel Tower, where she brought on Anthony Burgess as a witness for the defence in her fictional obscenity trial, Byatt enjoys mixing real people with her imaginary ones, even as she accords some of the latter the extended life of characters in Balzac: another episode of Through the Looking-Glass ...”

“... and in a way that not drawing attention to them would not. They make you think about poems as echo chambers, and of reading poetry as a way of hearing things; and about the fact that in the reading of poetry associations cross one’s mind that one is inclined to dismiss. If the ‘shake’ example seems peculiarly ill-judged when everywhere else in the book ...”

“... British novelists who went off to the war in mid-career in their mid-thirties, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, both wrote books about what they had seen at first hand, Waugh’s war being more overtly interesting (the Commandos, Crete, parachute training, Yugoslavia) but Powell’s more typical (garrison duties, staff work, office politics). In ...”

“... he died in Basle in 1934,not knowing that, years later, the Nazis would use in their gas chambers the pesticide he had helped to create to murder his half-sister, his brother-in-law, his nephews and countless other Jews who died hunkered down, muscles cramping, skin covered with red and green spots, bleeding from their ears, spitting foam from their ...”

“... to all that. Fouché died peacefully in his bed in 1820. Thurloe had similarly passed away in his chambers at Lincoln’s Inn in 1667, a pattern that would, alas, not be repeated in the Soviet Union.Jan Karlovich Berzin (born Pēteris Ķuzis in 1889) recruited the first generation of Soviet spies. From a Latvian peasant family, he participated in the 1905 ...”

“... did you choose your members?’ Of the first cited, Nolan at once replies: ‘He was in my chambers.’ Good to dine out on, but as somebody fairly points out, Nolan was by definition choosing his members pre-Nolanisation.12 November 1997. To Quentin Skinner’s inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Any method of appointment ...”

“... of John, and it is John who dies, shot by the Communists, but not before he records a Whittaker Chambers-like confession on a tape that is played as the commencement address at his alma mater. The salient combination in this elixir is anti-intellectualism and Catholicism. The genuine oddness of the insistence on Catholicism may be hard to recover in a year ...”