“... three major plays and one operetta he wrote before his 29th birthday. In 1780 he became an MP for Stafford and, aside from a couple of short periods of government office, remained a leading member of the Whig opposition (and in particular, a harrier of Pitt the Younger) throughout what was a long political career. His most noted campaign was against Warren ...”

“... it. Many nabobs had made their way into Parliament, and it was their influence which Charles James Fox and others sought to undermine when he introduced a reforming East India Bill in 1783: had Fox succeeded, the structure of Anglo-Indian relations would have been very different; that he did not succeed was, to a very large extent, due to the fact that ...”

“... left (communists, Trots) and the ‘legitimate’ left, which presumably refers to such groups as James Maxton’s ILP (before it gave up on the Labour Party and disaffiliated), Tony Benn and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, and Bevan and his Bevanites. This elicits the slightly alarming thought that if Bevan had ever become leader, he might have ...”

“... Between 1807 and 1821, agents acting for the Countess of Sutherland and her husband, Lord Stafford, removed several thousand people from their homes to make way for sheep farms, intending them to move to new settlements on the coast where the menfolk would find work as fishermen. But often the evictions were cruelly managed and the new homes ...”

“... rewarded by John with lands. Under Henry III he continued to prosper and became a baron. His son James (c.1220-77) was a royalist too in the Barons’ Wars and became Justiciar of Ireland in 1270. Two of his sons had descendants, the elder was the ancestor of the baronial family of Audeley of Heleigh Castle, Staffordshire and Red Castle, Salop which died out ...”

“... urge to correct also appeared in her letters: in 1973, for example, she wrote to Lowell that ‘James Merrill and I gave a joint reading – no, a sequential reading – at the YMHA.’ This enacting of a search for further precision and further care with terms was, in one way, a trick, a way of making the reader believe and trust a voice, or a way of ...”

“... assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s ...”

“... Grandpa Peel’s brother and was a wine and spirits merchant by profession. He ended his days in Stafford House, an old people’s home in Halifax, but very cheerfully, as he was convinced (and never missed an opportunity of telling you) that he was about to become a millionaire. Why? Because he, Norris Peel, had discovered the cure for arthritis, and once ...”

“... when her sister threw her out of the court after her secret marriage to a Mr Nobody called William Stafford. Grumble all you like about the feminisation of history, at Henry’s court you can’t avoid it; the politics of sex and procreation dominate, so chatter of caudles and possets and babies’ caps drowns out the masculine drone of tunnage and poundage ...”

“... Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her readers’ sophistication; the rest of us feel bamboozled.The​ essays in Seduction and Betrayal were written when Hardwick and ...”

“... sectarian theories and practices.The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics ...”

“... for the nation that denied their political freedom? In March 1942, the war cabinet’s emissary, Stafford Cripps, promised the Congress Party leadership that India would be granted self-government and dominion status after the war if it would continue to help the Allies win it. His mission failed – Gandhi called the offer a ‘postdated cheque drawn on a ...”

“... of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), James Atlas describes the eleven-part code of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of ...”

“... Carter Family, Morton Feldman, Beatrice Lillie (and fairies at the bottom of the garden), Elmore James, Giulio Cesare, Miss Kitty Wells, Vespro della beata vergine, South Pacific, Pet Sounds, Les Négresses Vertes, Dusty in Memphis, Ferrier’s Kindertötenlieder, Toots and the Maytals, Têtes Raides, Lulu, Lulu – even Gurdjieff’s potty piano ...”