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“... the ‘infamous brute’ whom it was Wilde’s worst bit of luck to cross, also had it in for Lord Rosebery, who at the time of the Wilde libel action was Prime Minister. Queensberry had followed Rosebery to Homburg, stalking him with a dogwhip (presumably, says Pearson, because he didn’t happen to have a horse with him), and grievous bodily harm was ...”

“... to get home only by writing an even more eloquent begging letter to a passing English aristocrat, Lord Arlington. In Todd’s reading, furthermore, Behn is no more successful as a lover than as a spy. Her liaisons are presented as unappealing (Todd, alive to any suggestion of ill-health, is almost prepared to take literally Wycherley’s poem ‘To the Sappho ...”

“... and British Columbia. On the accession of Queen Victoria, he was nominated by the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to a baronetcy as the representative man of letters at the same time as Herschel was nominated as the representative man of science. His attempts to attain a peerage were for many years frustrated by his wife, who behaved after their separation ...”

“... of the Times lead. The picture of Kingsley Amis seemed shrewdly chosen to forestall the ‘Lord Archer wins the lottery’, ‘lucky Stephen King’, or ‘not more cash for Martin’ reactions. Conservative values and Good English (virtues that Sir Kingsley and the Times share) would be the prime beneficiaries of the shattered book ...”

“... had been cut off. It turned out to be a false economy on the Duke’s part. Yet to say, as James Laver did, introducing the 1929 edition, that there was ‘no creative impulse’ behind the Memoirs is quite untrue. Once she got going Harriette Wilson clearly wrote for the pleasure of writing. Many of the people she depicts are obscure; she simply ...”

“... their path; Walpole’s homegrown example for this sort of ‘accidental sagacity’ was ‘of my Lord Shaftesbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table’. Walpole’s new word did not ...”

“... had to resign his post as Secretary to the Admiralty after the ejection of his patron (and former Lord High Admiral) James II. When Pepys died in May 1703, aged 70, the autopsy confirmed that he had lived hard: his lungs were full of black spots, his kidneys full of stones and his gut was discoloured and septic. And of ...”

“... else: a pseudo-monarchy, with government shared by a ‘single person’ – Oliver Cromwell, lord protector – and Parliament. Cromwell was backed by a written constitution, the work of another soldier, John Lambert, which focused on moderate franchise reform, checks and balances, and a certain degree of religious toleration. It was inaugurated in a ...”

“... Donegal and Cavan – in the Irish Republic. The colonial Plantation of Ulster in the reign of James VI and I covered six counties, but not those of today’s Northern Ireland. Ironically, the counties which became the redoubt of British Protestant settlement – Antrim and Down – were not technically part of the Plantation, which instead encompassed ...”

“... both sides know the game. And as the form becomes more self-conscious, the writer – Henry James is the obvious example – indicates both inside and outside his novel how the reader will divide the work with him and share the spoils. In this partnership we become lucid and wise. Even the most unlikely circumstances are arranged for our ...”

“... the art of the form brings into being. A real masterpiece like The Aspern Papers reveals James’s own fascination with the phenomenon of greed and power: the greed of the narrator for possession of the papers, whose ownership is poor Miss Tita’s only weapon in her struggle for power and for possession of him. Every touch in ...”

“... and Brian Clough, drove his men harder than most other commanders would have dared, Mr Rhodes James gets this across splendidly, yet even as one reads his harrowing accounts of the long marches and retreats through dense, humid jungle, or the last-ditch stand at the ‘Blackpool’ stronghold, one should not forget that these experiences are not notably ...”

“... Irish referred to the ‘English’ then rather than the ‘British’, a term favoured by James I but not by his English subjects, who in those days rejected it as firmly as the Scots, Welsh and Irish reject it today.) We can guess what Kipling felt about the founding of the Irish Free State, always referred to by Honor Tracy, herself aggressively ...”

“... by Cephas (alias Peter) and ‘above’ five hundred others, some of them still alive; also by James, and indeed by ‘all the apostles’. Finally, by a special grace, he was seen by Paul himself, unworthy as he was to be counted an apostle, en route to Damascus.A prodigiously learned Hebraist, Vermes has written many books about Jewish culture and ...”

“... I’m one of those writers who likes to stay with what he knows,’ James Gillespie, the persistently apolitical hero of Ronan Bennett’s third novel, The Catastrophist (1998), says. Gillespie, now a novelist, was once a historian. In his PhD he had argued that ‘the great political and religious upheavals of the 16th century owed little to ideological or doctrinal conviction, and everything to the Tudor state’s perpetual need for cash ...”