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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were suggesting. Monmouth voted that year for the Bill to exclude Charles’s brother James from the throne, with obvious hopes of becoming king himself. He protested that his reason for so voting was that his father’s life was in danger, causing the king to remark: ‘The kiss of Judas!’ Dedicating his play Tyrannic Love to Monmouth, Dryden ...”

“... there like Queen Mary’ was to indicate that a terminal blight had been cast over the occasion. James Pope-Hennessy, born in 1916, belonged to that generation. He came from a distinguished Catholic and literary family and was a friend of many of his most interesting contemporaries, Cecil Beaton and James Lees-Milne among ...”

“... it, of all hands, to be mightily and diligently looked into and cared for.’ On 18 August the Lord High Admiral, Howard of Effingham, wrote from his flagship, ‘Some made little account of Spanish force by sea, but I do warrant you, all this world never saw such a force as theirs was’; and even later Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge was by no means ...”

“... and wrote part of it down, the fragment of Weir of Hermiston. Ian Bell – like Jenni Calder and James Pope-Hennessy – has written a biography as readable as a romance. Not that Bell surrenders anything to the romantic stereotypes that cluster round RLS. On the dark pockets of Stevenson’s life, he takes a very sober line. In reaction to Balfour’s ...”

“... attitude that ‘light’ is synonymous with ‘suitable for children’, and the satire of ‘My Lord Tomnoddy’ would be lost on children, and in any case requires extensive explanation. Her Majesty’s councils his words will grace. Office he’ll hold and patronage sway. Fortunes and lives he will vote away. And what are his qualifications? ONE He’s ...”

“... knowledge of history. In his youth her husband had turned down Peel’s offer of the post of Irish Lord of the Treasury, and Peel thereafter ignored him, but is said to have prevented him from fighting what would have been the last duel in England. Gregory was later a Trustee of the National Gallery and Governor of Ceylon. She read the books in his excellent ...”

“... In November 1894 Henry James set down in his notebooks an outline for the novel that, eight years later, became The Wings of the Dove. He wrote about a heroine who was dying but in love with life. ‘She is equally pathetic in her doom and in her horror of it. If she only could live just a little; just a little more – just a little longer ...”

“... both academic and popular, most prominently in the Pulitzer-prize winning synthesis of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) – whose title alone suggested that we were back on familiar terrain – and in the sepia-tinted sentimentality of Ken Burns’s documentary. In McPherson’s influential work, a fixation on racial rather than ...”

“... because “homosexual” is too friendly a word for these horrible people.’ In 1945, the lord chamberlain’s office (tasked with passing, or censoring, plays before production, and like the Lords a source of long-running low-wattage comedy here), was moved by one play to state that ‘sentimentalising about perverts is a most insidious method of ...”

“... was that Prince Albert had provided the definitive and approved working model. Robert Rhodes James has written an entertaining and effective but oddly out-of-kilter book about that model. His standard texts appear to be Justin McCarthy and H.A.L. Fisher, historians whose reputations had faded when Mr James was a ...”

“... Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate ...”