“... of cases. George Eliot can do nothing with a Dorothea Brooke married to the man she loves. Henry James has to fix up Isabel and leave her in the most exalted stasis of all: being a perfect lady in her misfortune. What it comes to is that male authors present a woman as a ‘case’. In the Classics she is a tableau, like patience on a monument; in the ...”

“... utopian Philological Society, based at the University of London, the amazing sticktoitiveness of James Murray, editor and mastermind of the project from 1879 to his death in 1915, and the (initially) nervous patron, OUP, who inherited the project 22 year after its launch. Willinsky tells much the same story as that given by Elisabeth Murray (Caught in the ...”

“... of a heavy industry in academia. Ireland is a small nation – ‘an afterthought of Europe’, as James Joyce put it – and marginality is much in vogue at the moment. Yet it is also home to a magnificent body of literature, much of it written with wonderful convenience in the world’s premier language, and so easily accessible from Tokyo to Bogotá. Being ...”

“... Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to rationalise the contents of his hoard after the fact, and concentrated instead on his subject’s social and business interests and his patronage of scientific research. Frances Larson, in ...”

“... in all directions. Back in London, Smith mounted a rousing Alpine show which packed the Egyptian Hall for several seasons, firing the imaginations of future Cook’s tourists, who would eventually be rail-borne to the Alps for two weeks’ holiday at nine pounds per head. Albert Smith was not quite the sort of recruit sought by the high-minded Alpine ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a more and more prominent part of the décor. Misia and Diaghilev presided over the gala in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in 1923. The parties grew ever more enormous but the old innocence drained away. When Balanchine auditioned for Diaghilev – in Misia’s apartment, naturally – Diaghilev’s days were already numbered. By this time Sert and Misia ...”

“... Ukip and the Scottish National Party have shown that movement politics is capable of entering city hall peacefully and passionately.There is a further problem, which Lilla sidesteps: the awkward issue of identity politics in the age of globalisation. If you frame ‘identity politics’ as a self-indulgent distraction from the vital business of creating a ...”

“... 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 ...”