“... Orwell’s political prose to the kind of scrutiny ordinarily reserved for the novels of Henry James. John Sutherland has been reading and rereading Orwell ever since the 1954 BBC dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four alerted him to the novel’s existence. So he feels under no constraint either to bless or to damn a writer whose ...”

“... Shakespeare’s other English histories, works on which Tillyard dwelled: the chronicle of Edward Hall, which was a key source for Shakespeare, and Samuel Daniel’s The Civil Wars, in verse, which may have been.No one would charge Lake with bardolatry. Tillyard, warning against a tendency to assume that Shakespeare’s views are the ones most eloquently ...”

“... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent ...”

“... followed by Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court in the 1860s and 1870s). Students such as James Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone, who graduated from Edinburgh University in 1859, exhibited both pro-British and pro-African sympathies. Horton ‘welcomed British civilisation and Christianity’, Adi writes, ‘especially for what were considered to be ...”

“... was a moving force behind the National Trust’s new Country House Scheme, recommending James Lees-Milne for the job of historic buildings secretary and also helping to define the aesthetic which would be built up around the preserved country house. In English Country Houses (1941) she started to theorise the English country house in terms that ...”

“... in Armley but was now showing at the Palace in Onslow Street (closed in 1956 to become a bingo hall and currently a nightclub called The Drink). I hung about for a bit until a genial middle-aged man in glasses came along with one boy in tow already. This seemed to indicate respectability and I was about to ask him if he would take me in when he got in ...”

“... slowly part of the way home in his Armstrong Siddeley. In the car he produced a book of poems by James Joyce from the pouch in the door and told me that he read them when he was stuck in traffic jams. He asked, ‘Did you never think of killing yourself?’ but answered the question himself: ‘You would not know whom to kill.’It is astonishing to me, with ...”

“... the documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) and in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to ...”

“... some broken chunks of polystyrene. A second soldier comes into view, too busy firing down the hall to help his comrade.Another video selfie shows a man with a dirt-splattered face lying in a crater in a snow-covered field. He wears a Russian tankman’s headgear, with its distinctive padded strips. ‘Hi everybody,’ he says to the camera. ‘I’m in a ...”

“... William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice Pike. Unfortunately, his excitement over this discovery led him to make ...”

“... brought it into the open made Powell the most controversial person in politics: he could pack any hall, command any headlines and at the same time be rejected as unclean by newspapers and politicians. Iain Macleod, who had in the past been close to him personally and politically, worried at the effect on him of such isolation, and dined alone with him to ...”

“... his apprenticeship with Thomas Hudson. In 1762 Francis Knowle Clark Mundy inherited Markeaton Hall. He had Wright paint him and five of his friends in the livery of the Markeaton Hunt – his father and five of his friends had sat to Devis 13 years before. Wright poses them casually. Harry Peckham stands with hand on hip; he was to die after breaking his ...”

“... but it was Rachel who haunted the English literary imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth foolishly thinks of herself as destined for stardom because she is more beautiful than the ‘thin ...”

“... only learned of this fifteen years later. The hunt for the fifth persists. It was the tortured James Angleton – erstwhile head of CIA counter-intelligence, who had learnt part of his trade from Philby – who bitterly and despairingly credited the KGB with creating ‘a wilderness of mirrors’. Maybe, Angleton took too literally the extravagances of ...”

“... journalist Marchamont Nedham. All of these have been eclipsed in the recent preoccupation with James Harrington, the author of Oceana (1656), and his followers. The republicanism that emerges from Norbrook’s investigations is thus not confined to the militant saints and to those preoccupied with securing a Harringtonian ‘balance’ through ...”