“... the vicar of Wreay, some papers in the Carlisle Record Office and the diaries of Losh’s uncle, James. For the modern biographer it is slim pickings, and Uglow takes the only possible course, which is to build up the background and the context in the hope that they will describe an outline in the foreground, a space that will suggest what Losh was like and ...”

“... piles, pox and plague. Harington’s great innovation in domestic hygiene was so successful that James I is supposed to have brought him in as a troubleshooter to deal with the privies at Theobalds and Hampton Court. Harington was much more than a hygienist, however. Indeed, most of his works try to achieve rather too much at once. The Metamorphosis of Ajax ...”

“... On a winter’s evening in 1803, James Hogg turned up for dinner at the home of Walter Scott. The man his host liked to call ‘the honest grunter’ was shown into the drawing-room, where a pregnant Mrs Scott was resting on a sofa. Unsure of the protocol in these toney surroundings, and deciding to take his cue from the hostess, Hogg flopped onto an adjoining sofa, smirching the chintz with his dung-spattered boots ...”

“... more substantial of the two treatises edited by John Gouws as The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke – the other being A Letter to an Honourable Lady, where the lifelong bachelor Greville offered a mistreated wife (now unidentifiable, and perhaps imaginary) the questionable benefit of his advice and consolation. Sidney and Greville had been born in ...”

“... considerations of a less starkly ultimate kind might arise in connection with the subtitle of James Knowlson’s new biography: ‘The Life of Samuel Beckett’. (The main title looks suspiciously like a publisher’s wheeze, a low-grade spin on Beckett’s desperate formula for the modern artist as doomed to fail or, more tantalisingly, as driven by a ...”

“... school exams. If the answer was good, there would be an earnest hug, and a bellowed ‘Praise the Lord!’ Nothing was too small for the Lord’s attention. There were many good and kind people in this church. Nevertheless, it was full of punitive hysteria. It was perhaps the wrong kind of religion for a child because it ...”

“... almost everyone had access to a radio, though not in the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall and St James, where they were banned, or in the Palace of Westminster, where MPs needed to gather around an MP’s car parked outside if they wanted to hear a horse race or a cup tie. Under the Presbyterian influence of its first director general, ...”

“... for a new judicial order in the event of an Allied victory. In January 1942 the Declaration of St James had placed among the Allies’ principal war aims the punishment of those who, at whatever level, had been responsible for civilian massacres and the execution of hostages; though by the end of the war the UN War Crimes Commission was in doubt as to whether ...”

“... the Duke of Dunstable’s nephew, trying to ingratiate himself with his uncle by agreeing to steal Lord Emsworth’s pig, asks admiringly what Dunstable did in the Great War. The Joy in the Morning preface continues defensively as Wodehouse explains that what makes his characters seem ‘creatures of a dead past is that they are genial and good-tempered ...”

“... with such propaganda would be to overstate the case, Jones is allowing himself to sound less like James Joyce than William Joyce. In ‘Little Gidding’, ‘We only live, only suspire/Consumed by either fire or fire.’ On 11 September 1940, Churchill spoke of a ‘fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestige of Nazi tyranny ...”

“... down the even thinner track of the Victorian secularist movement. A Birmingham rector told Lord Ashley in 1842 that the working class, and in particular the industrial working class, had taken over from the gentry as the formers of the nation’s attitudes: ‘the lower orders are so large a class, and so influential, as very markedly to ...”

“... Kipling picked up and made use of – comes out at moments like the abandonment of the Patna in Lord Jim, when the officers in the boat see her lights vanish in the squall, and conclude she must be safely sunk. In fact, she is so far down by the head that she swings head to wind ‘as sharply as if she had been at anchor’, and the change of position cuts ...”

“... annoys the boat-keeper by projecting ‘thought-forms’ of Rotary Club dinners, starring the Lord Mayor of Stretchford, Cllr J.S. Goat. He is strong on magic, from the respectable, almost dowdy covens of the West Midlands to the more formidable necromancy practised by Ayurvedic dentists in India or by Life-Presidents in West Africa. He is in sympathy ...”

“... Five of them had been arrested as they tried to get on a ferry to Belfast to attend the funeral of James McDade, a prominent IRA member who had blown himself to pieces planting a bomb in Coventry. They had left Birmingham by train less than half an hour before the bombs went off, and the bombs were planted within a few hundred yards of Birmingham’s New ...”

“... at the prince regent’s coach on his way back from the opening of Parliament that same month, Lord Liverpool’s Tory government enacted another round of repression, suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, thus enabling imprisonment without trial. Released from solitary confinement in late 1818, the Manchester leaders, along with other radicals across the ...”