“... fame – even notoriety – in her own day meant that many people left accounts of what she said and did; but it also meant, as her previous biographer, Robert Halsband, has demonstrated, that dubious anecdotes had a habit of attaching themselves to her. Though Grundy attempts to solve the problem of naming by reserving ‘Montagu’ for the literary ...”

“... people are not strictly necessary, though they are often the ones that get read. A good life of Edward Garnett, on the other hand, might, since his is a known but hardly a famous name, fail to attract much attention. But everybody who has an interest in 20th-century English fiction should read Mr Jefferson’s book. It is sometimes a bit dull and ...”

“... thing the British constitution requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be ...”

“... run a serious literary magazine, Eliza, you must always ensure that only nice things are said and all writers kept happy – particularly the famous ones’? Through Ainsworth’s household Smith pulls together an omnibus edition of Victoriana: there are set-piece descriptions of dinners attended by Men of Letters, who boorishly fail to give Eliza a ...”

“... a form of industrial art. ‘It is only the taking of risks which makes life worth living,’ he said in the 1930s, maligning British car designers for their insufficient daring. But appreciation is one thing, driving another, and no matter how admiring or critical he was of cars and their design, Pevsner was always hopeless at the wheel. In her 2011 ...”

“... convinced that foreign doctors were all charlatans, carried a card when he went abroad that said ‘I am not really dead.’ In the same will in which he established the Nobel prizes, Alfred Nobel also required that his arteries be opened after his death, just in case. Harriet Martineau bequeathed ten guineas to the doctor willing to decapitate her; for ...”

“... new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation … We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ In several works of ...”

“... It has been said of the early Christian Irish that they were very interested in their history, but preferred it in the form of fiction. If one English reaction to his observation is likely to be that things have not changed much in the Emerald Isle, another ought to be that their own self-satisfaction is misplaced ...”

“... it is impossible to say. He was also anti-Dreyfusard, and she followed him in that too. Yeats said that ‘the troubling of his life’ began when he met her. Believing what she said about sex, he was devastated when she married John MacBride, the ‘drunken vainglorious lout’ who became a martyr in 1916. It was an ...”

“... with such long points that a cartwheel could pass over them without crushing flesh. Every day, said Holinshed, ‘there was devising of new fashions to the great hindrance and decay of the commonwealth.’ In the matter of clothing, the sumptuary laws of the Second World War were directed at less dandiacal, but still ...”

“... looks like being sick again. The owls Have built a stinking nest on the Eighteenth Century. (‘Edward Lear in February’) Middleton was also one of the pre-eminent translators of his era, chiefly from German. As an essayist he had few peers, though Guy Davenport was one of them. Middleton and Davenport met a few years after the war when Davenport was a ...”

“... and faded interiors of the kind seemingly much more conservative painters turned to – such as Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. Art of a given time and place comes to us with a sense of the rooms in which it was made. In England in the years between the wars that often meant a cottage in the country or a house in a village or market town. Nicholson lived ...”

“... contrast, they spent little of their time, and fewer of their resources, on doing good works. From Edward II until William and Mary, they presented maundy money to a handful of deserving indigents once each year; and from the Normans until the early Georges, largesse was distributed to the poor at royal pageants and progresses. Even adding occasional personal ...”

“... which was virtually guaranteed to create stepmother issues. Edgar should have been succeeded by Edward, the son of his first wife; next in line was Edmund, Æthelred’s elder brother by Edgar’s third wife, Ælfthryth. But Edmund died, and Edward was murdered at Corfe Castle in 978: ‘No worse deed for the English race ...”

“... have no question about it,’ Daniel Selznick – David’s son from his first marriage – said to Stein. ‘I’m not looking forward to seeing this in print, but it’s the truth. Let’s be honest with each other, it’s horribly damning. He was so selfish, so needful to protect his own reputation.’ Jones’s older son, Bob Walker, remembers ...”