“... and no illustrations offered other than that ‘booby-trapped parcels’ were sent to Prince Charles. (How many? All at once? What kind of booby trap? Was Prince Charles hurt? Was anyone hurt?) Wilkinson also recounts that an Animal Liberation Front member is ‘reported’ to have sent a leaflet to supporters calling ...”

“... dome is an armature of artistically worked steel some fifteen thousand feet in diameter. This passage is from ‘Cities [I]’, one of the so-called ‘urban’ Illuminations that conceive of the metropolis in ways that were proper to London in the 1870s, a teeming, futuristic heart of empire, all grandeur and abjection, progress and poverty, and quite ...”

“... Goldfinger or the LCC’s Architects’ Department, but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased with the ...”

“... market. Barkskins can fairly claim to be a family saga: René Sel is introduced on the first page, Charles Duquet (later Duke) on the second – both of them arriving in New France (later Canada) to work as indentured labourers before settling on the land they earn by their work – and members of both families are still present in the book seven hundred pages ...”

“... later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been sharing with Keats since Tom’s death nearly two years before. No one would come with Keats to the warm climate his doctors prescribed. Keats’s friends had ...”

“... the unsophisticated sentiments of the most natural and original of the species?’ This remarkable passage is not cited by Honour but it becomes especially interesting in view of the fact that Knight’s readers would have had the chance to see the public exhibition in London and Paris of an African woman, Saartjie Baartman, as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the ...”

“... this sense of an unbudging, implacable destructiveness that makes me anxious. It brings back a passage in Maurice Leitch’s Liberty Lad, a novel set in Co Antrim which I first read in 1974, the year the Power-Sharing Executive was brought down: ‘the old deadly derision, the curse which we all are born with in this cold cynical northern province’. And ...”

“... on his own, magically, at precisely the words that Cervantes uses. Borges’s narrator quotes a passage from Cervantes, followed by one from Menard. The quotations are ‘verbally identical’, and the sight of them on the page is already funny and disturbing enough, but Borges’s finest touch is more discreet, and truly dizzying. Having commented on the ...”

“... object or occasion. Not that we don’t enjoy some of these essays, especially time-honoured ones: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their stage representation is as delicious as it is dated. Yet unlike Lamb’s piece, the contemporary critical essay often demands a knowledge that is highly specialised, and uses a vocabulary drawn from ...”

“... took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have appreciated Baxter’s useful skill with ...”

“... of America are located in the writings, in turn, of Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens (gathered in Chapter Two under the heading ‘Institutional America’), Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke (‘Aesthetic America’), Kipling and R.L. Stevenson (‘Epic (and Chivalric) America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence ...”

“... companion of the Princess Ghika at the Villa Gamberaia up in Settignano. The philosopher, Charles Strong, his college mate, who had married a Rockefeller daughter, showed up.’ It’s like watching the suitcases rotate in an international airport. Miss Blood comes round again a hundred pages and a half a dozen years later, writing to Gertrude Stein ...”

“... more to discrediting a feeble pseudo-Jacobean pamphlet published forty years earlier by the actor Charles Macklin. Compared to his later tour de force in this line, however, these are mere squibs. When Samuel Ireland, unwitting dupe of his 19-year-old son William Henry, published Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William ...”

“... Evidence Act (1984), which laid down strict rules for the treatment of suspects. Before its passage, confessions could be extracted by any means necessary, so long as any injuries inflicted weren’t too obvious. There were no tape or video recordings, no lawyer present, just police officers. The suspects who confessed claimed they did so after being ...”

“... that it derives directly from an abridged version of the novel prepared by the London bookseller Charles Cooke in 1811. Cooke, or his hack, went through the ‘eighth’ edition rewriting phrases that appeared too colloquial or idiomatic and simplifying sentences that rambled or changed direction. He deleted notionally superfluous words and phrases ...”