“... not a university man: he was a North Country cotton merchant and wartime army officer who had seen Sarah Bernhardt when he was 13. ‘Her acting,’ he said, ‘unveiled for me the ecstasy of the body and the torture of the mind.’ When he was 20, Agate went to Paris, to see the actress Réjane and provoke her into giving a better performance. He was devoted ...”

“... and remained active in radical politics for the next thirty-odd years. At the age of 19 he married Sarah Johnson, his landlady’s daughter, and she brought him enough money to establish himself in Lambeth as a bookseller and stationer. He campaigned among other things for a new, more humane system of poor relief, improvement in the management of lunatic ...”

“... and at reasons for emigrating. The vast mass of New England settlers came from East Anglia and Kent, clothing and Puritan counties. Professor Breen rightly refuses to distinguish between economic and religious reasons for emigration: both existed in Laud’s England, often in the same person. The Stuart government was increasingly interfering in local ...”

“... for mastery between architect and patron was played out notoriously at Blenheim Palace where Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, and her architect, John Vanbrugh, fought all the way to the House of Lords and on to Chancery. Their relations ended in an undignified exchange of personal insults after which the duchess barred Vanbrugh from the house, obliging him ...”

“... in Whitechapel, they had had three or four children, two of whom had survived: my mother, named Sarah, which she changed to Sybil, to her later regret, and her younger brother, Montague, called Monty. Grandpa was a fishmonger. In the early 1920s he had had an offer from a friend in the film industry, Jack Hyams, to become a partner. Had he accepted he’d ...”