“... aside, Bernhardt always had a soft spot, she said, for the entire Bonaparte family); Charles Haas (elegant model for Proust’s Swann); ‘Bertie’, the cuddly future Edward VII; the artist-engraver Gustave Doré; and at least one woman, the trouser-wearing sculptor Louise Abbéma. Gottlieb refers to Abbéma, somewhat ungallantly, as ...”

“... supposed to have died, alone, unknown, a stranger to his wife and his sons, in a furnished room on Charles Street. My own father spent two or three years in his late seventies alone at the farm in Hanover. The only heat was a fireplace; his only companion a halfwit who lived up the road. I lived as a young man in cold, ugly and forsaken places yearning for a ...”

“... McIntyre’ and a group of young shop stewards from the Rosyth Dockyard, who ‘included Charlie Boyle, Helen Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this shows, they didn’t all have to be men, but usually they were. There is no doubt that Brown tried to ...”

“... a time when Isaac Butt’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was giving way to that of Charles Stewart Parnell. The club, in Dawson Street, was a place to meet and smoke and drink and discuss politics. He played an active part in the 1880 elections to the Westminster Parliament, helping ensure that the two Conservative candidates standing in his ...”

“... Palladio, the Renaissance architect; Abraham Cowley, the 17th-century poet; Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, the founders of modern science; John Locke, their philosophical counterpart; John Milton, represented by Paradise Lost; William Sherlock, the theologian; and Paul de Rapin, author of the bestselling History of England, published in the ...”

“... Butt, who became a regular dinner guest at Wilde’s house in Westland Row, and the novelists Charles Lever and Sheridan Le Fanu. He also travelled to London and then to Vienna and Berlin to pursue his medical studies; he visited Prague, Munich and Brussels. In 1843 he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a ...”

“... the following persons met their deaths by hunger, owing to the neglect of the Guardians of the Boyle Union: KILSHALVEY ELECTORAL DIVISION – Mrs Kilkenny and child, after several applications for relief in vain; Mary Connell, found dead by a rick of turf; Philip M’Gowan’s wife and daughter; Bryan Flanagan, found dead by the road side; Widow Davy’s ...”