“... Mitford’s other books and papers at her death before making their way to an obscure poet called William Cox Bennett. They surfaced again only when Bennett invited a young book collector to his lodgings in Camberwell for buttered toast and sausages. As the plates were cleared away and the contents of Mitford’s parcel were emptied out onto the table, the ...”

“... In his Foreword to a new biography of Anthony Chenevix-Trench,* one-time headmaster of Eton, Sir William Gladstone writes that Trench’s ‘interest was in drawing out the best from boys as individuals’. Another interest, not mentioned by Sir William, lay in drawing down the underpants of boys – as individuals ...”

“... Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and it didn’t seem as though they were pulling in opposite directions (as James Leslie Mitchell, his real name, Gibbon was, after all, a socialist internationalist). For the rebellious, rebellion was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus ...”

“... of Britain to pressure the Scots by force of arms into a marriage between his son, Edward, and James V’s daughter, Mary, the infant queen of Scots. This step towards Anglo-Scottish union was designed first to pre-empt a marriage that would strengthen Scotland’s ‘auld alliance’ with France and second to neutralise the north while Henry’s war ...”

“... has since been pronounced on them I hail as one very good thing that has happened in my lifetime. William Hazlitt shows up well by comparison with Lamb, his contemporary. Yet I wonder if the more attractive persona that Hazlitt projects doesn’t blind us to the fact that he conceives of the essay just as Lamb did: as, precisely, the projection of a ...”

“... of ‘the frost subdu’d, / Gradual, resolves into a weeping thaw’, though Johnson’s admired James Thomson, author of these lines, came close to being Fergusson’s contemporary. That sense of linguistic jolting and, not infrequently, of cross-linguistic connections lends Watson’s anthology its revelatory potential. Ossianic translatorese, the Burns ...”

“... William Golding’s working material, the stuff he lights upon and makes his novels out of – and which he regularly proceeds to subvert or transform to his purpose, introducing levels of meaning unsuspected in the raw stuff – never ceases to retain its importance for these novels. Coral Island, we all know, provided the working material for Lord of the Flies; and if Mr Golding’s purpose was to subvert a favourite myth about English boyhood, he nevertheless chose a worthy myth – one we can still half assent to while half persuaded by the black, reductive alternative ...”

“... view. The most widely read study was The Arms of Krupp, a thousand-page epic published in 1968 by William Manchester, better known for his account of the assassination of his wartime friend, John F. Kennedy, Death of a President. Written in a racy, sometimes sensational style, the book was full of sweeping generalisations about Germany and the Germans, whom ...”

“... In addition to Howells, Freeman and Jordan herself, these roles were eventually filled by Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and seven others whose names have largely disappeared from literary history: Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, John Kendrick Bangs, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown and Henry Van Dyke (‘the friend of the ...”

“... written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of ...”

“... royal adviser said, ‘to be put in a new romanso’ – when the future Charles I and his father James I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a commonplace practice of the age, produced a succession of ...”

“... Eight years later, by which time her passionate affair with Fullerton was long over, Henry James, in one of his last letters to her, confirmed her first thoughts about the man who had fascinated them both. ‘WMF … is the most inscrutable of men – he will never pose long enough for the Camera of Identification.’ Marion Mainwaring, in Mysteries of ...”

“... Physics. The story of his life and science, apparently an ideal subject, is a potential nightmare. James Gleick’s Genius, published in 1992, was faulted by some of Feynman’s friends for not capturing the playful side of Feynman’s personality; others complained that the book’s avoidance of mathematics made for an anaemic rendering of the ...”

“... blue, cobalt, violet ... we can hardly doubt that something meaningful is intended. But what? William Boyd’s title is inspired by Wallace Stevens’s enigmatic ‘Landscape with Boat’ (quoted epigraphically): He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air. He ...”

“... the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp. He has said a good deal already – the little boy who wants to be like his father, the sheltered child who doesn’t need to know the ...”