“... In the summer of 1797, William Godwin set out on a tour of the Midlands. He had hoped to visit, among others, Erasmus Darwin, but finding the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set eyes on him ...”

“... In June​ 1934, Richmal Crompton published ‘William and the Nasties’ in the Happy Magazine, an interwar journal that provided readers with a cheerful stream of popular fiction. In this story, William Brown, 11-year-old leader of the Outlaws, decides to become a Nazi. Despite his interest in ‘rightin’ people’s wrongs’, he has been impressed by his friend Henry’s account of ‘the Nasties’ in Germany:‘They can’t be called nasties,’ said William ...”

“... away from her and died of pneumonia in a rural stationmaster’s house a few days later. Although William Nickell and the contemporary Russian journalists whose work he has explored for The Death of Tolstoy try to make an enigma of the 82-year-old writer’s ‘complex and provocative’ nocturnal flight from his ancestral home, the count had been brooding ...”

“... We know​ a gratifying amount about William Byrd, partly thanks to quite recent archival rediscoveries, and Kerry McCarthy splendidly and concisely presents it all in this intelligent and affectionate biography. Alas, the one thing we don’t have is a contemporary portrait, not even anything as clumsy as the universally recognisable dome-headed icon of Shakespeare: the portrait-image of Byrd adorning CD sleeves and scores is an unimaginative Georgian-Tudor pastiche ...”

“... the search for Franklin began, and 1859, when M’Clintock discovered some grisly remains on King William Island, almost thirty naval and overland expeditions joined the search. A writer has to juggle the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark ...”

“... task. He has edited the new seven-volume edition of the Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, having edited previously, with some help from Marilyn Butler, all of Godwin’s novels. Philp is undoubtedly the country’s leading Godwinian, having established his authority with his study of Political Justice. He has perhaps become ...”

“... menagerie at Chelsea. But generous trust could easily be satirised as simple-minded credulity. James Salter, a fellow Ulsterman and one-time servant of Sloane, put objects such as ‘Pontius Pilate’s Wife’s Chambermaid’s Sister’s Hat’, allegedly acquired from his former master, on show at a coffee house in Cheyne Walk. It was thanks to Salter ...”

“... merchant turned cattle herdsman), Sir Richard Bulkeley (an early 18th-century hunchback virtuoso), William Blake (‘I see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ‘imbecile’), preferred to leave ...”

“... his The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. has been reviewed in these pages, nor are Norman Stone, James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes always less fanciful. And if Hitler’s personality remains an unanswered question, so too, does the history of National Socialism – which a book like Robert Harbison’s recent Deliberate Regression: The disastrous ...”

“... his mother, Dawn Chadwick, and their old friend (or acceptable enemy, depending how you read it), William Nelson. These people are all failures, all refugees, all victims. Chadwick is a failed stockbroker. Nelson is a man in what used to be known as ‘reduced circumstances’: a failure in banking, a refugee from the nightmare memory of watching a close ...”

“... was a side effect of excessive public spending. Neoliberal economists such as Friedman and James Buchanan argued that hippies and activists would soon be brought into line if they were given a dose of financial responsibility, by having to pay tuition fees, for instance, or the debt on a mortgage. Alternatively, if their parents were forced to pick up ...”

“... form of sublimated fandom of the more traditional kind.’ Trump is one result of this. Similarly, James Meek has observed of Jacob Rees-Mogg thathis career shows how much like sport British politics has become, where politicians have fans and supporters, rather than voters who are swayed by their arguments or troubled by their extra-parliamentary ...”

“... a box containing the original illustrations from Every Short Story (2012). They tumbled out like a William Blake vision: boggle-eyed angler fish, flying horses, crying demons, brain babies, Amazonian women, scenes of bacchanalia: a smorgasbord of grotesquerie. In another box, I discovered an exquisite book called ‘Morag’s Museum’, which Gray made for ...”

“... containing his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French. However, it seems that ‘more than a third of Conrad’s ...”

“... was the era of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, when the masque was at its extravagant height under James I, and in 1613, around the time this portrait was painted, Lanier composed his first masque song, ‘Bring away this sacred tree’, and performed it at court in The Squires’ Masque. Lanier was looking for advancement and perhaps having his picture ...”