“... an indigenous British current of it had got under way, passed from Coleridge and Carlyle to John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold. From this radical-Romantic viewpoint, industrial capitalism was to be condemned for stifling a creativity which the arts, above all, most finely exemplified. Art was the enemy of alienation, craftsmanship the antithesis of ...”

“... Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, there ...”

“... Of the short novel he published in 1932 she gets the very title wrong. And poor Henry Arthur Jones must have suffered enough from his name without being transposed into Arthur Henry. Shaw’s near-compulsion was not a fetish. He was capable of loving women who were neither singers nor actresses. Indeed, he married one of them – who, if Ms Peters has ...”

“... more annoying than adultery). His patient Loë Kann was mistress of his second-in-command Ernest Jones, and letters flew between the three of them about her treatment. Freud spoke warmly of her as he always did – ‘I have become extraordinarily fond of this Loë ... she is a treasure.’ In contrast with his venomous attitude towards some of his male ...”

“... Useful Knowledge – which, stunningly, had Benjamin Franklin, the Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones and the agriculturalist Arthur Young among its corresponding members – that one-horse Kentish town boasted a humane society, assorted drinking and dining clubs, an agricultural society, concert and music societies, trapball and card societies, a book ...”

“... Killing Time is that it is not simply a review of 1999 in verse. In the section about Piccard and Jones, the round-the-world balloonists, Armitage cleverly employs negatives as escape clauses when he wants to tick off some recent horrors without pretending that he is capable of generating poetry from them. In the process, he makes some strange ...”

“... merely quaint. His legacy hasn’t worn well. Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John Singer Sargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither Sargent’s bravura as a portraitist at the centre of the Anglo-American ...”

“... of clientage networks. From the 1970s early modern revisionists such as Conrad Russell and John Morrill showed that the English Civil War did not arise out of a long-running constitutional dispute centred on the rise of Parliament. Parliaments (the plural is significant) served as points of contact between the centre and the counties and were largely ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... of scholars are courteously acknowledged for a piece of information or a useful edition; Emrys Jones is praised for a model political reading of Cymbeline, as is D.J. Enright for a poem that is also an act of criticism. But the level of citation of others’ work is low, especially by American standards, and with the single exception of Hugh Kenner no ...”

“... each other: W.J.B. Owen (1967) used the 1798 text, Derek Roper (1968) used 1805, while Brett and Jones (1963) combined 1798 with Vol. II of 1800. Now Mason appears, to reissue the text still available in Roper’s version – and what else? He might have gone in for a critical edition, condensing the interpretative debates, or for supplementing the notes of ...”

“... as, if not equal to their own, certainly worthy of respect. Take the great Orientalist Sir William Jones (of whom Jasanoff might have made more), who declared Sanskrit – one of many languages in which he was proficient – to be ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either’. The Persians were, he insisted, a ...”

“... Cable, Frank Field, Alan Haselhurst, Ann Widdecombe, George Young and, most remarkable of all, John Bercow, who many on our side favour as a way of getting back at the Tories. I should also report that one other wildly improbable name has been mentioned: moi. ‘Mr Speaker Mullin,’ Nick Robinson called as I was on the phone in the Members’ Lobby, and ...”

“... just as he had schmoozed Buckingham. In London there were two men – the architect Inigo Jones and the collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – who could claim to be authorities when it came to art in Italy, but on the ground there they had to deal, as did Charles, with the piratical broker Daniel Nijs. Nijs pounced on the Gonzagas of Mantua when ...”

“... but the most interestingly historical of them, Y Gododdín, does so only tangentially. Whatever John Morris and Leslie Alcock may have written in the 1970s and 1980s, the evidence provides ‘no space … for an “Age of Arthur” during which a victorious British emperor-like figure held back the barbarian hordes’. That image really dates back to the ...”