“... could they have committed themselves to serial publication in the nerve-stretching form it then took.In his contract for Drood Dickens for the first time had a clause inserted providing for arbitration on how much of the up-front money (£7,500 to cover the first 25,000 copies) should be repaid ‘if the said Charles Dickens shall die’ or be otherwise ...”

“... Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever ...”

“... careless, though – his wound could probably have been avoided), and at home during the war he took charge of his section in the Home Guard, drilling the awkward squad, which included Fred Warburg, with great seriousness, and teaching them to make bombs out of milk bottles. He saw in the Home Guard the makings of a revolutionary militia, his view no doubt ...”

“... he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of ...”

“... but even more so because its sensational image may encourage false, 20th-century expectations. But John Burrow will not mind. He writes to burst joy’s bubble upon the tongue. A Liberal Descent, like the works of 19th-century historical scholarship that it discusses, is written out of a tradition that respects personality (which is not at all the same thing ...”

“... bookish’ (he alludes more than once to his days as a university lecturer in English), took the form of his book less from the river than from other books. His model was the quest-romance, especially in its Renaissance versions, but he borrowed elements from heroic legends of all ages. ‘A journey which had all the essential features of a ...”

“... around from beyond the grave?) A final credit should be given to the admirable illustrations by John Lawrence, which themselves suggest the interesting precedent of Brisley Le Fanu’s wash drawings to accompany Sheridan’s tales. In giving us an additional, visual register against which to check the ambiguities and intimations of the narrative, the ...”

“... I begin to realise that the courage Trimble displayed at the peace talks, the great risk he took there, has given a significant section of the Unionist community a new imaginative charge. It would be sentimental to say that the spirit of those 18th-century Presbyterians is behind the words of the News Letter, but something has radically changed here. On ...”

“... which characterised the period of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Furthermore, its emergence took place ‘in the margin’: that is to say, outside the customary academic and intellectual writing centres in the United States. The Language Movement deliberately eschewed those centres and developed its own audiences, avenues of communication, and organs ...”

“... given way to Bebe Rebozo. Watergate scattered this group in all directions (including jail) and it took some imagination to believe that much the same group would take over power again just six years later – but this is exactly what happened. Reagan re-installed such Nixon stalwarts as Haig, Shultz, Weinberger and Casey, while Ed Meese and Larry Speakes gave ...”

“... were we to need reminding – that a death has meaning. ‘Tragedy, which might be noble,’ John Kerrigan remarks, ‘always, just the same, means waste’; as though some imagined economy has gone awry. Either there’s an anomaly in the system, or there’s no system. What happened at Dunblane is called a tragedy because we take it for granted that ...”

“... left – Frank was both intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after ...”

“... had been at least part of the inspiration for a book by one of the editors of this volume, John Elliott: his Richelieu and Olivares (1984). For all that this volume is produced with the lavishness we have come to expect from Yale University Press, with no less than 74 illustrations, most of them portraits of 37 ‘favourites’ and of the monarchs they ...”

“... head was about to be struck off. ‘Where is it?’ Starkey’s account of what the martyrologist John Foxe called, in the short novel included in his Book of Martyrs, ‘the miraculous preservation of the Lady Elizabeth’, is detailed and thorough, one of the most insightful short histories of the reign of Mary, and it corrects many supposed facts and a ...”

“... There is a novel by John Masefield called ODTAA. Its title stands for ‘One Damn Thing After Another’. This would be a good title for a biography of George Gascoigne. Despite having a fine crop of literary firsts to his name (the first Italian-style comedy in English, one of the very first versions of a Greek tragedy in English, and one of the earliest systematic discussions of English metre), he was one of the unluckiest English poets ...”