“... In the autumn​ of 1777, as the American War ground on, Charles James Fox paid his first visit to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth. The young duchess was captivated by her new house guest. His conversation, Georgiana told her mother, ‘is like a brilliant player at billiards, the strokes follow one another piff paff ...”

“... of various family members. His exploration of the hitherto obscure roles of Cassandra and of James, the eldest brother, is one of his best discoveries. In the years in which Jane was at last getting published, Cassandra can already be seen as a family watchdog. When Sense and Sensibility emerged in 1811, Cassandra begged everyone to keep Jane’s ...”

“... camellias bloom at Christmas. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times; on his sixth attempt, in 1998, he ruptured a heart valve. Sark is the world’s first Dark Sky Island, benefiting from an absence of streetlights. Its leading politician became a powerboating world ...”

“... the grave. Also excluded from the original edition were, for example, William Jardine and Sir James Matheson, the founders of the famous company which bear their name. Their refusal to agree to Chinese requests to desist from the opium trade led to the disgraceful Opium War of 1840-2, a war which Jardine suggested could be brought to an end by a simple ...”

“... and (less controversially, indeed uncontroversially) the universal popularity of the music hall. Thompson’s picture of the Victorian working class – as an autonomous, powerful sector of the society generating and achieving for itself goals which resembled but also crucially differed from bourgeois goals – has some important economic ...”

“... produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what ...”

“... at the price of an incomes policy that eventually drove the low-paid into revolt. The last days of James Callaghan, with grave-diggers on strike and NUPE pulling the plug on hospital patients, were piteous and shameful and the ‘winter of discontent’ ensured the victory of Mrs Thatcher. Though Labour were out, the future was still uncertain. Few realised in ...”

“... huge (given a big enough counterweight you could lower St Paul’s into its now roofless turbine hall), and it’s also slap-bang in the middle of London. From the roof level, which I visited the other day with its current developer, Rob Tincknell of the Battersea Power Station Development Company, the city heaves away on all sides in a modest swell of glass ...”

“... insanity in an English courtroom, but the case that really launches his narrative is that of James Hadfield, who on 15 May 1800 was arrested in the Drury Lane Theatre after firing a pistol at George III as he was blowing a kiss to his subjects from the royal box. There was no question that Hadfield had acted with deadly intent. He had loaded his pistols ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... of such a life is chiefly of interest for the celebrities which it encountered. In 1966, Professor James Bertram brought out the New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold, which included all Clough’s longer ‘anti-podistic’ letters to his friend between 1847 and 1851: these had been omitted from F.L. Mulhauser’s Correspondence of A.H. Clough (1957). The New ...”

“... plus a smattering of tourists had much good to say about Britain’s capital. Literary folk like James and Conrad slipped into the illusionary language of the dark sublime. London was dismal, blackened, sick, cruel and unplanned, concurred the charitable and the analytic; the sooner the authorities could draw the working population and their smokestacks out ...”

“... only be imitated by a copyist who dispenses with the usual patient diligence. Reynolds’s pupil James Northcote described to Hazlitt ‘a whole-length portrait by Velázquez, that seemed done while the colours were yet wet; every thing was touched in, as it were, by a wish; there was such a power that it thrilled through your whole frame.’ Reynolds was ...”

“... second published novels, drew heavily for inspiration on Wuthering Heights. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has a doomed gathering whose names all begin with H. Jane Eyre has the unquiet invisible ghost of the red room, and – more significantly – the preoccupation with food, starvation, sustenance. Considering how bad The Professor is – it was the only one ...”

“... bit underpowered, but with a thesis. This is that the theme of the double – a theme so dear to James Hogg, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Dostoevsky – has its origin in Christian dualism, and then becomes a literary device, and part of a moral psychology. What concerns Herdman more is what happens to the whole idea of the double once a scientific psychology gets ...”