“... the household of Mary of Modena, the 15-year-old second wife of the Duke of York (the future James II). She was later transferred to entertain his younger daughter, the emotionally, intellectually and physically challenged Princess Anne. This was hardly a plum position: Anne was third in line to the throne with the likelihood that ...”

“... the first Black player to have been signed by a Major League team, was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Motown, the record label founded by Berry Gordy in Detroit in 1959, quickly became synonymous with joyful pop songs influenced in equal measure by rock ’n’ roll and gospel, showing that Black youth culture wasn’t confined to race-related ...”

“... officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy ...”

“... Oxford 1968-9. In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the factional newspaper, or distributing the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink ...”

“... incited by the felon’s dependants. The corpse was subsequently taken to the Barber Surgeons’ Hall in London for a public dissection followed by a sumptuous feast. This sequence of events indicates that – apart from everything else – a dissection at this time had a cathartic function as a ‘crisis’ through which the public onlookers were guided ...”

“... wives and a student or two (and one student’s mother), and trying to write a book on James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States, a Pennsylvanian who sought at (almost) all costs to keep the South in the Union. But then Alf was doing these things before and (presumably) after the Ford years too; what happened only in the Ford ...”

“... The haunted picture became a cliché of Gothic fiction and the scene on show is set in a lofty hall with crocketed niches and heraldic displays of armour much like Walpole’s own, across which our heroine, skirts and headdress flying, pursues the villain, who clutches a wriggling Leolyn under one arm. One of the attractions of melodrama, in both ...”

“... stay in Italy. Then after Christmas I read Gabriele Annan’s review in the LRB (7 January) of James Fox’s The Langhorne Sisters – Nancy had been the middle one of the five – and began to understand. Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now in his nineties and still ...”

“... male power, the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey. Like the third storey at Thornfield Hall from whose terrace Jane surveys the landscape, vowing to have her share of life, even if she is a female and ‘poor, obscure and plain’ to boot, Galesia’s ‘garret-closet’ occupies a symbolic space between the life she lives and the life she ...”

“... The book includes Hecht’s most frequently anthologised poem, ‘The Dover Bitch’, a music-hall turn on Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. There were also poems that held private, darker meanings, especially ‘More Light! More Light!’, about a savage incident at Buchenwald. The Hard Hours won the Pulitzer Prize.Hecht indulged in such dark ...”

“... January Before’. In January, Protestant Mungo becomes involved with a young Catholic called James. In May, he is entrusted by his mother to the care of a couple of men she met at Alcoholics Anonymous, who undertake to show him the wild beauty of Scotland, and to teach him to fish. If this novel was your only source of information you would assume that ...”

“... streetlights – and wonder what’s locked in all those boxes. At the count in the King’s Hall the following day, a journalist tells me it was 200 years ago this morning that Lord Edward Fitzgerald issued the order for the United Irish Uprising to commence. A man my age points to a former terrorist a yard from us: ‘Hi, see thon fella – he put a ...”

“... alive. ‘I think he has had – will have had – the most exquisite literary fortune,’ Henry James wrote to Edmund Gosse when Pater died in 1894, ‘i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the style, the genius) & absolutely not at all with the person. He is the mask without the face.’ For ...”

“... Laird of Abbotsford, graced with titles (baronet and sheriff), broad acres and his own baronial hall. Success is the central theme of John Sutherland’s book too. But step by step he unwraps Lockhart’s packaging, beginning with the anecdotes. Too many couldn’t have occurred at the date specified: Sutherland refers drily to Lockhart’s ‘usual ...”

“... formed less than two years previously (they would become the King’s Men after the accession of James I in 1603). They were already the most popular troupe in town, with their leading actor Richard Burbage and their star comic Will Kempe, and their player-poet Shakespeare turning out such hits as Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s ...”