“... The Rebirth of an English Country House, written by the new earl and Tim Knox, reproduces a passage from the journal of an 18th-century traveller called Joseph Pococke, who visited in 1754 and was particularly impressed with the grounds:The gardens are very beautifully laid out, in a serpentine river, pieces of water, lawns, &c, and very gracefully ...”

“... sickening motion of the Deathworm had replaced the usual flow of blood in my veins.’ In the same passage Shelley, with ‘his ardent mouth, his exalted being, his simplicity and enthusiasm’, is exempt from blame. ‘She poisoned my life,’ Mary wrote in an uncharacteristic outburst to Trelawny. ‘I would not go to Paradise with her as a companion ...”

“... that broke out in 1919, as later nationalist piety would insist. It is startling to read, in Charles Townshend’s fine study, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ...”

“... in 1904 did not happen again. The most influential anti-semite in the early years of the state was Charles Bewley. He was a Quaker convert to Catholicism, a senior counsel and diplomat. In 1921 he went to Berlin as Irish Consul. Within a year he was causing trouble. In a Berlin café he insulted Robert Briscoe, who was visiting, and the Jewish owner, and was ...”

“... The last​ Habsburg prime minister, Heinrich Lammasch, appointed on 27 October 1918 by Emperor Charles I, served for sixteen days. He was an Austrian jurist and long-term advocate of a league of nations, who had urged the signing of a separate peace with the Allies in early 1918. As prime minister he was accused by the Austrian press of being a ‘liquidator’, presiding over the end of empire ...”

“... none seemed adequate. In 1667 a committee of three – the architect Louis Le Vaux, the painter Charles Le Brun and the scientist and architectural theorist Claude Perrault – was set up. These three men were asked to co-operate on a final design. The east and south fronts, as they were built, have elements taken from existing work (windows on the ground ...”

“... well have been thought capricious at the time. Who recommended the omission of Stan Laurel and Charles Laughton from the 1960s volume, and was he or she later fired for incompetence? Was Radclyffe Hall left out of the Forties volume because she was unlikely to be remembered, or because she was best forgotten? Was it a prejudice against social ...”

“... of the crowd. Development and progress, Spencer had claimed, could always be defined as the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous structure. Retrogression was literally the return towards the undifferentiated state. The ghastly image of retrogression to some inchoate mass of matter was thus frequently evoked, whether to characterise the ...”

“... built around the disappearances of Klara von Acht, daughter of Alois von Acht, and of the crown of Charles V. The girl and her friends die or go missing when they rashly walk out to meet their Russian liberators; the crown cannot be found in its proper place among art treasures stored in a salt-mine. These mysteries, although well enough sustained, at first ...”

“... from the company of Art’s immortals. Not without difficulty Millais persuaded her to omit this passage from later editions, on the grounds that he did not paint the picture specifically for Pear’s. Corelli’s regard for fairness and accuracy was never high. Occasionally she defends a statement with a footnote like ‘Said to me by one of the “lady ...”

“... ethnocentric quality of this material is a further cause for depression. The ‘history’ of the passage we have cited is the history of France, and of France alone – in this book anyway. What sort of history it is should be apparent in a moment. It is surely for the ethnologist to decide how such practices as those mentioned above bear on the issue of ...”

“... this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s marriage, which was only four days before Mary’s birth. His wife (thought to have been his cook) was a competent businesswoman and, unexpectedly, a good shot with a revolver. Mary learned from her the ...”

“... from anyone’s received idea of a poet. He wasn’t poor: in fact, he was very rich, the son of Charles Merrill, founder of the biggest Wall Street brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch. He wasn’t tormented – at least he didn’t have mental breakdowns or attempt suicide. He drank a lot but not famously and he eventually joined AA without becoming sanctimonious ...”

“... animate their voting behaviour, in this case, revenge. A Texan Representative had nearly secured passage of a resolution calling for a balanced Federal budget which, had it passed, would have gutted many pork-barrel projects and ensured the defeat of many of his colleagues at the next election. Seeing the supercollider roll past, the greasiest pork-barrel ...”

“... or far-reaching political reforms’ (the OED cites a 1793 instance referring to Charles James Fox); ‘Jacobin’ was the alternative used to describe more extreme positions that rejected reform. It’s hard to apply the latter term to Wordsworth, even if it was occasionally used of him (despite his meticulous Prelude revisions, Thomas ...”