“... decision-making to the practical needs of the financial situation of the family’. Indeed, James Prichard devised the category of ‘moral insanity’ as a diagnosis (an ‘ambiguous modification of insanity’, he called it) expressly tailored to the needs of wealthy families keen to deprive relatives who were troublesome, but not insane by the usual ...”

“... the same subject. As well as the two Milibands, Balls and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick ...”

“... is still somehow Anglican, but an ecumenical Anglican. A representative Catholic equivalent is James McConica, with his specialised study English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (1965), followed by his recent excellent short general book in Oxford’s Past Masters series. For a general ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... literary types to muscle in on rather more weighty matters than insect imagery in the later James. Spivak, by contrast, has a proper scorn for such ‘culturalism’, even if she shares a good many of its assumptions. She does not make the mistake of imagining that an essay on the figure of the woman in A Passage to India is inherently more threatening ...”

“... was already there. But when it came to the Underground, London did reach out, to the countryside. Edward Watkin, who became chairman of the Metropolitan in 1872, drove the Underground overground for 35 miles, to Aylesbury, in order to further his ambition to build mainline railways linking England and France through a Channel tunnel. He failed in that, but ...”

“... splayed, and listen to Romantic music on his elderly record-player. The reticent passion of Edward Elgar was the sound of my childhood, the sound of the Malvern hills in summer (though I’ve never seen them, in fact), the valleys as gentle as stomachs, the fatherly oaks with their green brains, and the grass flattened by the shoes of walkers – all ...”

“... a table convivially cluttered with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed ...”

“... The editor very occasionally supplies material from published biography, but his usual source is James Clifford, and one can tire of Clifford’s editorialising – for instance, on Hester Thrale’s behaviour after the death of her husband: ‘Mrs Thrale’s usual reaction to death was to run away.’ If we’re going to have occasional opinions from ...”

“... likely to be seen as settling a score rather than diagnosing the ills of the literary marketplace. Edward St Aubyn, whose new novel, Lost for Words, is a satirical farce about the machinations behind a famous literary prize, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006 with Mother’s Milk, but lost out to Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. ‘Ego’ can ...”

“... In the late 1540s, the much more self-consciously Protestant government of Henry’s son, Edward VI, delivered the coup de grâce to the old system. It closed and confiscated the endowments of the thousands of chantries where non-monastic priests still celebrated masses for souls. In doing so it killed off a host of accompanying devotional practices ...”

“... of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer with great assurance. And, more recently, Robert Rhodes James discovered the roots of Anthony Eden’s vulnerability better than any contemporary profile-writer. This is not the privilege of hindsight. Newspaper editors simply do not have high enough standards. They should commission profiles from our best ...”

“... nature was also the careerist who desperately sought public office, working his way up to become James I’s lord chancellor, only to be brought down by his political opponents on a charge of corruption. It used to be said that there was no connection between Bacon’s intellectual life and his public career. Macaulay set the pattern for this interpretation ...”

“... in evidence in the original English translation by Engels and his two colleagues, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Engels extensively revised their work). One reason to welcome a new translation is that old terms and cadences tend to petrify: repeat a phrase often enough and its meaning can harden into doctrine, the very opposite of the critical attitude Marx ...”

“... from’ echoes the reckoning with British colonial education in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s writings on ‘Nation Language’, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey and Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack, among others. Much like these precursors, Brand is ...”