“... some access to a literary community: John Milton wrote a sonnet to her sister; the romance writer George Pettie was a relation of her mother’s; and, since her manuscripts were first discovered in a library in Leeds in the mid-1990s, some scholars have argued that her work may have influenced Andrew Marvell. In more than ...”

“... deans, and all the trappings of authority. He had the temperament, and many of the attitudes, of George Orwell, and his family background was similar. ‘Phony’ was a favourite word of his, freely applied to anyone whose status or fame exceeded their proven abilities. Wittgenstein, the mathematician Max Newman, the economist David Champernowne, von ...”

“... Horizon. The Horizon survey, in fact, serves as a model for this new investigation. In 1946, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Julian Maclaren-Ross each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a ...”

“... An excellent storyteller, he describes very well those figures from the past whom he admires, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Those he dislikes, on the other hand, are little more than caricatures: Thomas Paine, for example, was ‘a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler’. No one seeking a fair-minded account of the American past ...”

“... acceptable face of Scottish communitarianism. His foremost predecessor, the anti-Unionist patriot Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716), has recently enjoyed some celebrity beyond Scotland in the wake of John Pocock’s voyages around the civic humanist tradition. Fletcher is immediately unsettling, with his vision of a Europe of city-states and his modest ...”

“... Not only was there a republican majority, but the once loyal Scotsman was falling into the grip of Andrew Neil, one of the brashest anti-Royal voices in the Carlton debate. Most commentary about the programme was fearfully disapproving: crass, vulgar, ill-judged, a ‘tasteless screaming-match’ and so on. The Independent Television Commission later supported ...”

“... bedbugs (an estimate, surely). Bedbugs were a major hazard. Not everyone could afford, like George III, to hire a man of the calibre of Andrew Cooke, of Holborn, ‘Bug Destroyer to His Majesty’, who had ‘cured 16,000 beds with great applause’. The author does not dwell too long on those Victorian horrors ...”

“... stable and suitable for life.As an illustration, in 1983 Lovelock and the atmospheric scientist Andrew Watson devised Daisyworld, a computer simulation of a hypothetical world in which ecological competition between daisies of different colours affects planetary albedo, or the amount of solar radiation that is reflected back out into space – one of the ...”

“... convicted paedophile.’ So much for Hill the inspiring teacher and widely admired college head. Andrew Roberts in the Daily Mail went so far as to assert, as though it were an established fact rather than wild fiction, that Hill had been unmasked as a ‘spy’ and had been ‘revealed as an “agent of influence” for Stalin’s USSR at the very time he ...”

“... He argued for armed struggle against those who would later become more radical than him, notably George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. For a time, it worked. The Palestinians took pride in the achievements, however modest, of their young men against a vastly superior Israeli army with superpower weapons. Arafat had received ...”

“... in before that Charlie Richardson, leader of the Richardson Gang, was buried here, as well as George Cornell, the gangster shot by the Kray Twins in The Blind Beggar pub. But it was the graves and sentry toys of the unknown children that had lodged in my mind. The trees were bare, filtering light on the tombstones and pointing down at the stories gathered ...”

“... his favourite numbers from Gilbert and Sullivan, as he manufactures his own myth. The young idler George Melvin in ‘The Villain-Worshipper’ is bowled over by the thought of him: ‘That’s the man for my money … Stingaree, sir, is the greatest chap in all these colonies, and deserves to be viceroy when they get Federation.’ But Stingaree persuades ...”

“... to define and interpret doctrine. If the Crown threatened that power, implied the future bishop George Carleton in 1610, then bishops ‘have warrant not to obey princes, because with these things Christ hath put them in trust’. By now the divine right of bishops was becoming a familiar doctrine. It may have owed its origin to the nervousness with which ...”

“... desire for direct contact with the public, and the same is true of the novels, in which, as George Eliot put it, ‘he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium.’ Powerful theatre managers had to be dealt with, like Marplay in The Author’s Farce, but according to the theatre historian Robert Hume, ‘Fielding quickly made himself the most ...”

“... the water of the Severne, Trent or Thames cannot wash away.‘What are private losses,’ Major George Wither asked, ‘while we view/Three famous Kingdoms, woefully expos’d.’ Historians of the period know the frustration of encountering narratives that edge towards, but ultimately recoil from, personal experience. Evidential shortcomings are ...”