“... to St Augustine and 17th-century writers of spiritual self-examination like Bunyan and Sir Thomas Browne, Buckley focuses on the Romantic emergence of what he calls the ‘subjective impulse’, with Rousseau and Wordsworth as the founders of autobiography as we know it, where the interest is in the exploration of the self for its own sake, and not for the ...”

“... for weeks, walking round the garden listening to the tape and saying the words out loud. 3 May. Lord Browne disgraced largely thanks to the Mail on Sunday and the bribery of a Canadian youth. The newspapers painstakingly explain why we should feel no sympathy for him, but if the Mail chose to target Heinrich Himmler I would tend to be on his side. The ...”

“... the Mansion House was not struck by a thunderbolt on the night in 1936 when the Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, told the guests at the Lord Mayor’s Dinner: ‘His Majesty’s Judges are satisfied with the almost universal admiration in which they are held.’ Or, for that matter, on the same occasion in 1953 when the ...”

“... For Sir Thomas Browne it was a commonplace that ‘the number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.’ But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8 ...”

“... Peter Brooke each receiving £8049 of public money to assuage their sense of political failure. Lord Waddington stood down as Leader of the House of Lords at the same time, for which he received £12,639, plus (shortly afterwards) the Governorship of Bermuda, at a salary of £63,000 per annum. David Mellor received £8049 when he resigned. Michael Mates ...”

“... show in a furious email Black wrote to Tom Bower, protesting that Bower’s forthcoming book about Lord and Lady Black was going to be ‘a heartwarming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system, have been ostracised; and largely impoverished, and that I ...”

“... technicality and it was rumoured that young Curzon had been in the picture, the boy’s father, Lord Scarsdale, continued – as did many parents of lesser eminence – to hold O.B. in the highest regard. George himself, on leaving Eton for Balliol, wrote O.B. a long and admirable letter expressing his sense of ‘how good and great an influence’ O.B. had ...”

“... at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1931; First Chancellor’s Classical Medallist; Porson Prizeman; Browne Medallist, 1932; fellow of Trinity, 1934-38; professor of Greek at the University of Sydney, 1937-39. He was 25 when he was appointed to the chair at Sydney. There was a classicist called John Powell, so it was as Enoch that he became known. Enoch at ...”

“... does deal with the place of the imagination in the work of reader and writer. A passage in Lord of the Flies, when Simon’s body moves at the water’s edge, is justly called ‘wonderful’. The rest of the section consists mostly of verse, and the commentary admires the quality of ‘indistinctness’ – writing dense with metaphor and ...”

“... the analysis of readerly bemusement and conjecture, as well as the occasional eureka moment. Ben Browne, a yeoman farmer of Troutbeck in Westmorland, was irritated to distraction in his copiously annotated copy of A Tale of a Tub: ‘I can’t conjecture ye meaning of this tho’ tis capable of sevral Interpretations.’ An unknown reader of Abel Evans’s ...”

“... entry for 5 January 1666 – first, the version by Bright in Wheatley’s edition: 5th. I with my Lord Bruncker and Mrs Williams by coach with four horses to London, to my Lord’s house in Covent-Guarden. But, Lord! what staring to see a nobleman’s coach come to town. And porters every ...”

“... school exams. If the answer was good, there would be an earnest hug, and a bellowed ‘Praise the Lord!’ Nothing was too small for the Lord’s attention. There were many good and kind people in this church. Nevertheless, it was full of punitive hysteria. It was perhaps the wrong kind of religion for a child because it ...”

“... cannot conceal Charles’s violent human interest. At 19, he had become involved with Anne Browne, daughter of a prominent courtier. They were pledged, they anticipated the marriage, and Anne became pregnant. But Charles abandoned her and married her aunt, Margaret Mortimer, who had more money. Having sold off some of the aunt’s property, he then ...”

“... emerge in embedded quotations from Comus and Paradise Lost, and allusions to Montaigne, Thomas Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning ...”

“... including Thomas Cranmer, were all her clients. And she shared her religion with her brother, Lord Rochford, who on the scaffold confessed: ‘I was . . . one of those who most favoured the gospel of Jesus Christ.’ For all that her preferred reading was in French, Anne’s own copy of William Tyndale’s English New Testament (1534) still survives. Ives ...”