“... incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorus glowing about the circumference of a body of water – as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous ...”

“... Wizard of the North and the rich Laird of Abbotsford, graced with titles (baronet and sheriff), broad acres and his own baronial hall. Success is the central theme of John Sutherland’s book too. But step by step he unwraps Lockhart’s packaging, beginning with the anecdotes. Too many couldn’t have occurred at the date specified: Sutherland refers drily ...”

“... He had inherited a family tradition of populist politics suffused with unabashed religiosity. William Wedgwood Benn had started as a Congregationalist and a Liberal: at 28 the youngest MP in the 1906 Parliament (whereas his own father had had to wait for a seat until he was 42). ‘Now Anthony has been chosen at the age of 25, so the family seems to be ...”

“... intervention would compromise at one stroke the careful edifice of peace campaigns and ‘broad fronts’ through which the Party had ingratiatingly tried, with some success, to keep in with the Labour Left and the trade-union apparat. I used to read the Morning Star (which had changed its name from the Daily Worker to become, as one comrade put it, a ...”

“... by without a murder as they rode high and free on their motorbikes shooting from the pillion in broad daylight. Then strangely, after ten months or so, the army came and arrested some of them, whereupon the owner of the lottery was himself assassinated, then his wife and son as well. Nobody came forward to denounce the paramilitaries, and they were ...”

“... specific to the latecomer. And it’s not clear that the implacable deafness is pathological. William Gibson said the future is already with us, it’s just not very evenly distributed: someone who indefatigably comes to your house when you have crawled away in exhaustion is a social monstrosity but also, quite possibly, simply caught in a wrinkle in ...”

“... what about the name of the ferry boat? The Duchess M, trundling backwards and forwards across the broad river, between the bustling international container port of Tilbury and Gravesend, the historic sump of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, feels like a subliminal tribute to Thatcher: little visited now, but with persisting memories of the days when she was ...”

“... were carefully adapted to the particular interests of their recipients. Some derive from the broad humour of the early Tudor poet and playwright John Heywood, whom Harington greatly admired, but the most spry anticipate the sharpness of Ben Jonson, which is probably why Jonson was keen to dismiss them in conversation with ...”

“... like a foreigner’, another that he was of ‘Jewish appearance’. His physique was ‘broad-shouldered’ or ‘stout’, and his style was ‘shabby genteel’. Lis could fit well enough with this, though not with the general estimate of the suspect’s age, which was a decade or so older than Lis’s 20 years. The most detailed description was ...”

“... receive witty Addisonian or Popean epistles until his daily postbag looked more like that of ‘a broad plodding son of Day-Book and Ledger’ than a ploughboy’s. Later it was the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, which he founded and dominated, a space in which young men from the town and the farms gathered to drink, laugh, boast about their girls and engage in ...”

“... Tom-All-Alone’s. The instalment begins, however, with the relentlessly self-promoting law-clerk William Guppy, who several hundred pages before had identified Esther Summerson’s true parentage, and immediately sought her hand in marriage (Esther remembers him as heavily scented on that occasion with ‘bear’s-grease, and other perfumery’). He is about ...”

“... amazing, easy efficiency of the intellectual machine which ground away behind his wide temples and broad, smiling face’.Ramsey’s social circle overlapped with the Bloomsbury Group and he shared their ideology of intimate friendship and free love. This didn’t always work out well. At one point, he became obsessed with a friend’s wife, asking her ...”

“... and economic consequences of American independence for the British West Indian colonies, the broad reassessment of the nation’s commercial interests in first half of the 19th century, and then the ways that those shifts figured in the 1807 abolition of the British slave trade and the overthrow of slavery in the British Empire in 1838. In the final ...”

“... and 1974, however, he showed no drawings at all, having come to think, as he told his biographer William Feaver, that his compulsion for linear accuracy was a ‘limiting and limited vehicle’. ‘He seems to have distrusted his own facility as a draughtsman,’ Treves writes, ‘and feared the future it promised of book illustration and decoration, but ...”

“... wine, Lacryma Christi. The experience brought out something reckless in even the most serious. William Hamilton, who did more than anyone to further vulcanology as an academic study, made the ascent during the 1767 eruption in the company of the art historian Johann Winckelmann. They were travelling with the Prussian ambassador to Vienna, who had written a ...”