“... were written between 1814 (Waverley) and 1819 (The Bride of Lammermoor). Meanwhile there seems little or nothing to do about the distressing nether parts, which are not so much bestial as apparently slightly silly: Gothic Abbotsford, the hard line on Peterloo and on riotous weavers, and at least twice as many more gimcrack, pasteboard novels and ...”

“... classicism designed to negate the lachrymose effusions of the previous generation’s romanticism. Arthur Symons said of Gautier’s poems that they showed how ‘words could build as strongly as stones’, and wilfulness here carries the sense of chiselling designs out of uncut blocks, a description that captures something of Flaubert’s yelling out sounds ...”

“... isolates y and z by means of some rigorous and attentive sleuthing, and is then able, with a little lateral thinking, to deduce x: the identity of the murderer. Take, by way of concrete illustration, Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging (1936). The president in question is Dr Josiah Umpleby, head of St Anthony’s College, Oxbridge (not ...”

“... affairs of state should be entrusted by the king ‘to persons whose intemperate passions were so little under the control of reason’. So it proved. Canning recovered from his wound but both men had to resign public office. No glamour or romance attached to the incident, which was regarded as scandalous. But it was more than scandalous; as Hunt argues, it ...”

“... at the Hermannsburg Mission in 1929 as Indigenous ‘dreamings’, ‘Emu Hunt’ and ‘Four Little Girls Walking’; they are in fact traditional European cat’s cradle patterns the girls would have been taught by the German nuns who ran the mission. The Aboriginal flag, a horizontal black and red with a yellow disc, was first flown in 1971, and two or ...”

“... generations over the giveaway of lands they stood to govern after the Ottoman Empire crumbled. Arthur Balfour’s letter to Walter Rothschild affirming the British government’s support for ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine was a milestone in the history of Israel’s creation, even if the idea dismayed a number of prominent British ...”

“... the question hanging. The fact it exists at all is due to an act of subterfuge: it was taken by Arthur Barrett, a photographer for the Daily Mirror who smuggled a camera into court concealed in his top hat. He had cut a small flap in the hat to allow the lens to peek out and, as he said later, ‘clicked the shutter and coughed at the same time and hurried ...”

“... in G Minor in 1876, was of ‘the genius of a master of whom we in this country know far too little’), it is a courageous change of mind. A controversial aspect of Shaw’s Music is the decision to reprint all the articles Shaw ghosted for Vandeleur Lee in the Hornet when he first came to London in 1876. At the end of his life Shaw wrote that ‘the ...”

“... One famous proclamation (reproduced in Lawson’s book) was issued in 1830 by Governor George Arthur in comic-strip form, and showed, in its last frame, an Englishman being hanged for shooting a native (though there’s no evidence that I’ve seen that this ever happened). The problem was that Britain didn’t have the means to enforce humanitarianism on ...”

“... us up: he was struck in the heart and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of tissue, blood and powdered cloth. Near him another man raised himself to fire, but the machine-gun caught him in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves. He was one to whom early ...”

“... academic and the journalistic worlds’ of early 19th-century Edinburgh and London, though he had little time for Scottish professors. Indeed De Quincey, and Blackwood’s Magazine, seem to Lindop models of a virtuous compromise between journalism and scholarship; he thinks we should not allow ‘these poles to draw apart’, adding the names of contemporary ...”

“... appeared at Meir, near el-Qusiya in Lower Egypt. The first edition, published in 1897, says very little about the find: ‘The discovery was made by natives, to which fact the unfortunately mutilated condition of the papyrus may be ascribed. Most of the fractures are recent.’ The Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge, writing in 1920, remembered that he bought the ...”

“... friend and follower, exclaimed to his leader: ‘we are committing an injustice.’ Much later Arthur Ruppin, who directed Zionist colonisation in the 1920s, warned ‘that Herzl’s concept of a Jewish state was only possible because he ignored the presence of the Arabs.’ Undeterred, Zionists continued to implement what in other circumstances might have ...”

“... 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan said: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 10. An experienced cabinet minister said in an interview: ‘I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give ...”

“... else is known against this great under-achiever? Anne Edwards tells us that he was a crony of Lord Arthur Somerset, who was allowed to flee the country after being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the ...”