“... of Aphra Behn, Defoe, Fielding or Smollett, while Dickens ignored the subject of sex altogether. Michael Mason’s main problem is to determine how prudery affected behaviour. Was it merely a veneer of hypocrisy, covering up a very different sexual reality? Were there fewer, and less enjoyable, sexual acts inside and outside marriage? Wild figures once ...”

“... Michael Burn assumes in this book that the name of Richard Hillary means nothing to present-day readers, so the reviewer had better follow his practice and provide biographical details. Although he was born in Australia shortly after the end of the First World War, Hillary came to England at an early age and had a thoroughly English upper middle-class education – prep school, followed by public school (Shrewsbury) and Oxford (Trinity College ...”

“... appear more tractable on Europe; if David Davis had moved decisively in the immediate aftermath of Michael Howard’s resignation or been a more fluent speaker; if Howard had offered Cameron the shadow chancellorship or George Osborne had not accepted it – if these or any number of other contingencies had been ...”

“... except the need for change. ‘There were all these cronies sitting on the second floor,’ Michael Ovitz adds, ‘who just hung out at the business and sucked the profits out of it.’ In 1975, Meyer and Ovitz joined forces with Bill Haber, Mike Rosenfeld and Rowland Perkins, and together they founded Creative Artists Agency (CAA). At first they were ...”

“... showing how Protestant ideals influenced the middle-class constitutionalism of Opposition MPs. Michael Walzer went further in his Revolution of the Saints by arguing that Calvinism was a modernising ideology. With breathtaking audacity, he leapt from case-studies of Marian exiles to New Model soldiers belting out battle hymns, in pursuit of his thesis that ...”

“... What​ a difference six inches can make. George Orwell was shot in the neck on 20 May 1937 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM (roughly translatable as ‘The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification’). He was six foot two. If he’d been five foot eight the bullet would have gone through his head ...”

“... briefly by an unregarded few. And so it comes about that the Victorians – Browning, no less than George Eliot – are back in favour, not just for their undemanding and verbally profligate forms but for their portentous preoccupation: how to lose religious faith and yet preserve all the psychological comforts which that faith had afforded. More than a ...”

“... over from mechanical systems for data storage and typesetting, the same was said of computers. George Landow’s Hypertext is about one way of using computers to manipulate texts. He makes high claims for hypertext, a richly interconnected kind of database. ‘Critical theory,’ Landow writes, ‘promises to theorise hypertext and hypertext promises to ...”

“... of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and ...”

“... young and though fair, who can hold such a cargo/Of all the good qualities going as Margot?’ George Curzon, a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ... you never will beat’ the wit of dear Margot. (‘Emma’, presumably, would have posed a dilemma for both of them.) Gladstone ...”

“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned ...”

“... security adviser, Mike Waltz, is a Floridian soldier who wouldn’t have been out of place in George W. Bush’s team. Waltz has spent much of the last few years raging about the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, which he believes will lead to ‘al-Qaida 3.0’. On Russia and the war in Ukraine he complained not of the cost to the US but of ...”

“... thought him a fool, and this assumption prevented other artists from profiting by his example. George Eliot remembered Piero’s eggs and reclusive habits in Romola, improving the story yet again: why she has the eggs delivered ready-boiled is a question for Victorianists. Vasari had got on to something important when he perceived that the lives of ...”

“... who left as lasting a stamp on the political landscape as Peel, Joseph Chamberlain or Lloyd George. Lord Blake treads warily. Indeed, one of the disappointments of the later, added chapters is that he feels obliged to be indiscriminately polite to anyone not yet quite dead. Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint. His tribute to the organisational genius of ...”

“... man. It was this quality of sheer doggedness that made him so formidable a defender of men like George Edalji and Oscar Slater, whom he saw as languishing in prison (or even, as in Slater’s case, under threat of the gallows) as a consequence of judicial error compounded by bureaucratic intransigence. Over all this ground great honour has to be accorded ...”