“... there is to say. Such might be the motto of the Beckett enthusiast. An ingenious recent article by James Hansford devotes almost twenty pages to a story whose original manuscript consists of a bare page of typescript,1 But the apparent-neglect of due critical economy is easily explained by the character of Beckett’s corpus of writings. To borrow the term ...”

“... and are proud to be just about decipherable in the blurred background of a majesty-mayoral-chain-lord-lieutenant-town-crier framed photo on a mantlepiece of honour in a spit and polish house just like all the houses of the house-proud little people they’ve ever seen. They know the scent of fresh paint, of just-crimped lawns, beeswax, Cardinal Red ...”

“... Swinburne, who proposed that Romeo was a satirical representation of the queen’s aged counsellor Lord Burghley, ‘the first and perhaps the strongest evidence’ being the ‘impossibility of discovering a single point of likeness’, for ‘this would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all-powerful ...”

“... followed by Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court in the 1860s and 1870s). Students such as James Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone, who graduated from Edinburgh University in 1859, exhibited both pro-British and pro-African sympathies. Horton ‘welcomed British civilisation and Christianity’, Adi writes, ‘especially for what were considered to be ...”

“... Surrounding them are figures more tenuously linked to Purbeck: Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, James Meade Falkner (who wrote Moonfleet), Gerald Brenan, John Stewart Collis, Fritz Schumacher, John Eliot Gardiner (son of Rolf) and via him Roger Norrington, Lord Hinchinbrooke, Jimmy Edwards, Kenneth Allsop, Tariq ...”

“... long poems since Auden and MacNeice were at their peak. It is not as long as either ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ or Autumn Journal but it has much of their verve and genial bravura. It embodies the quality to which it is dedicated. ‘In Praise of Gusto’ returns to some of the same subject-matter dealt with in earlier works, but this time it is all brought ...”

“... manual labour, and learning from peasant wisdom, he retained to the end many traits of the wilful lord. The importance he attached to avoiding fornication reflected his deep fascination with and perplexity over women, not to mention deep shame at his own sensuality.’ Tolstoy’s worldwide fame at his death is off the scale by which such things are normally ...”

“... but it was Rachel who haunted the English literary imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth foolishly thinks of herself as destined for stardom because she is more beautiful than the ‘thin ...”

“... support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian; and he was delighted to play Burke to Harold Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor ...”

“... Party, two MI5 officers in particular had fallen under the spell of the imaginative CIA agent James Angleton. Angleton became convinced that Wilson was a Russian agent and he conveyed this certainty to Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Arthur Martin took on board Angleton’s ‘certainty’ that Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson’s predecessor as leader of the ...”

“... my heart has not an equal sensibility for all.’ Her long ordeal is to be tested by the libertine Lord Derby: ‘Shall this country girl make a sighing coxcomb of me? Yes, so far as to answer to my purpose, but, by jove, she shall dearly pay for it.’ Sophia admits that ‘excessive sensibility’ has led her to ‘take a step, which, in my days of calm ...”

“... Chronicle, the Annual Register and two West Country newspapers, with an occasional glance at James Fenimore Cooper’s history of the US Navy. The craft involved range from men-of-war and merchantmen to schooners, jollyboats and even small pleasure-craft, the capsizing of which would not normally count as shipwrecks. The author is not concerned with the ...”

“... was held in the House of Commons. But despite his best efforts there was a flaw in the plan. Lord Lucan had vanished just two weeks before Stonehouse and people were on the lookout. So when a bank employee on his lunch break noticed a tall, self-assured Englishman going in and out of a number of different banks in central Melbourne, he called the ...”

“... him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of ...”

“... totally foreign to their day to day lives’. Venice-on-Thames. The royal parks, such as St James’s and Hyde Park, began opening to the public in the 17th century, while places like the Bear Gardens south of the river offered food and music, as well as bear-baiting, to more unruly customers. But the observant would have noticed something rather ...”