“... Standing on the deck of the sinking Lusitania, the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style and, those who knew him, by his great ...”

“... Ambrose did it to preserve his voice or because someone might overhear him reading a difficult passage and ask him to explain it. Scholars have, in turn, asked why Augustine found Ambrose’s silent reading noteworthy: was it simply his ability to do it, or the peculiarity of his solitude?What’s clear is that reading was, for most people, a fundamentally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”