“... of the Hellfire Club and for his involvement in the editing and publishing of his friend Thomas Potter’s poem An Essay on Woman, which succeeded in lowering the tone even of pornography. Cash told the full story of that poem in ‘An Essay on Woman’ by John Wilkes and Thomas Potter (2001) and does not rehearse it ...”

“... than a million, at the age of 91. And the oldest person in Britain was also among the richest. Elizabeth Ramsden died in 1817, worth £140,000, at the age of 106. The average age at death of the whole adult population was probably 50 at most. In Britain 200 years ago, the more you got the longer you lived; and the longer you lived the more you got. This ...”

“... wisdom of the ages together with her top-class legal education and opted for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s considered definition of obscenity: ‘I know it when I see it.’ Back to the Twelve Personal Commandments. The first, it has to be said, is difficult: ‘Be Gretchen’. I can see the sense in that as things stand, but being Gretchen is ...”

“... to live among the poor, in his own words, ‘as a man longs for his wedding day’. Beatrice Potter and Charles Booth figure, but more as urban explorers and dabblers in cross-class masquerade than as sociological researchers. Toynbee Hall’s ubiquitous Samuel and Henrietta Barnett show up, but their sexually conflicted acolyte, C.R. Ashbee, quickly ...”

“... into gold, using the fabled philosopher’s stone: an idea picked up by J. K. Rowling for Harry Potter. Other literary outings are more cynical, and so closer to reality. In Chaucer’s Canon Yeoman’s Tale, the yeoman is poor because his master, a practitioner of ‘that slippery science’, is poor. His tale concerns another canon, who with ‘sleights ...”

“... on themselves: do I matter? It is a reaction to the totality presented in the poems. This is what Elizabeth Hardwick heard in Plath’s 1962 BBC recordings, and we must trust the diamond-hardness of Hardwick’s ear, sending out its ray like Marco’s stickpin in The Bell Jar: I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have ...”

“... on Havana cigars. Feminist art historians have often found her exasperating. As in the case of Elizabeth Butler, the pre-eminent battle painter of Victorian Britain, Bonheur’s subjects don’t easily lend themselves to gendered analysis. Linda Nochlin deplored Bonheur’s indecision in both asserting and shunning her femininity (Nochlin called it ...”

“... 987-1328’, but his interpretation has served as a model for many subsequent studies, including Elizabeth Hallam’s Capetian France, 987-1328 (1980) and Dominique Barthélémy’s Nouvelle Histoire des Capétiens 987-1214 (2012), with its emphasis on the creation of ‘la patrimoine’ and accounts of the rule of particular monarchs. Jean Dunbabin’s ...”

“... Diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George ...”

“... empty Leeds and the train to King’s Cross. 10 September. Watch some of a programme about Dennis Potter, but the assumptions it makes about the relationship between art and life are so naive and wide-eyed and scarcely above the tabloid level that I don’t persist. It takes Potter at his own self-valuation (always ...”

“... my heroines appeared on the back page of the comic I read then, called Girl: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie mingled with Albert Schweitzer and Davy Crockett; their stirring words were blazoned in balloons, against backdrops of crenellated castles, jungles, battlefields. In the pages of the magazines my mother took, I ...”

“... have English as a second language, but the names they suggest for the story are always similar: Elizabeth, Henry, Jack. You can only be a hero, we have told children, if you have that kind of name: names licked clean by kings and queens. One of the highest compliments in Kipling’s writing is: ‘You’re a white man.’ That is changing now, albeit ...”

“... pump through my body, calming me.’ She improved her Italian by reading a translation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; Viktor Frankl’s memoir of his confinement in Nazi concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning, served as her ‘How to Survive Prison’ manual. She sang, at the top of her lungs, every song she knew by heart: the ...”

“... the simplistic morality of an attack on homosexuals in the theatre by someone called John Deane Potter. (‘These are evil men,’ Potter wrote. ‘They have spun their web through the West End today until it is a simmering scandal.’) But he took an unexpected turn at the end of his riposte: ‘Ever since I started work ...”

“... sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours ...”