“... church towers and at Oxford and Cambridge colleges the latest architectural ideas were emerging as English Perpendicular, the fine-boned local expression of Gothic. Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like ...”

“... of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice Pike. Unfortunately, his excitement over this discovery led him to make the tactical error of ...”

“... for a split at 1815 and an end in the 1880s. So in choosing to conclude his new survey at 1880, Richard Price joins a long tradition of irreverent timekeeping. Except that, according to Price, it is not the 19th century that ends in the 1880s, but the ‘long’ 18th century. In recent years the lifetime of the distinctive political regime and social ...”

“... in 1740, a date at which many educated persons and even second-rate playwrights could write lively English. Cibber became Poet Laureate and is now best known as the victim of Pope’s ridicule, but his book gives one a lively idea not only of the theatre of his day and its antecedents but of the political world in which it had to exist. His perceptive sketches ...”

“... her novel in a crusader’s spirit. She claimed to have written the first full-length treatment in English of women who loved women. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, she said, ‘the subject was only introduced as an episode.’ (She seems not to have known Dickens’s Tattycoram and Miss Wade.) She wanted to ‘smash the conspiracy of silence’, but ...”

“... colour pictures for the coronation sitting that really transport Elizabeth back into the prewar English almost avant-garde. With her gold and ermine and intense red mouth, she might have been captured by the semi-surrealist pioneer of colour Madame Yevonde. The brilliance of Beaton’s early royal photographs, especially the coronation pictures, consists in ...”

“... Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures on Elocution was once a great hit in Edinburgh. The other Thomas Sheridan, known as Tommy to the tabloids and to friends and enemies alike, is the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, and his efforts to represent himself in a defamation case against the News of the World has been providing the city with a theatrical spectacle the Edinburgh Festival will struggle to equal ...”

“... emperor to receive a conventional education, at Gakushuin, Japan’s grandest school; among his English tutors was Elizabeth Vining, an American Quaker, who nicknamed him ‘Jimmy’. ‘His interests in those days were almost entirely confined to fish,’ she wrote later, ‘and I felt they needed broadening.’ The influence of this American pacifist on ...”

“... synchronous and unsuspended disbelief in Noises Off, the Cuba of Clouds (Angel tells Mara, an English journalist: ‘this country is not the world. The world is in other places’): these are similar devices. Likewise in Towards the street of shame seems to its functionaries an inexorable universe. Dyson dreams of television celebrity and its benefits ...”

“... in Portuguese literary affairs, he worked in Lisbon for thirty years writing letters in French and English for commercial firms to earn the modest living that would sustain his writing. He had friendships – though one doesn’t often gather this from the writing – but he lived alone. He had apparently no love affairs, and published very little of the ...”

“... identifies one particularly interesting ‘reverse’ passage on the subject of the body by an English writer on science, S. Parkes, whose book The Chemical Catechism was published in 1818: ‘The human body is itself a laboratory, in which by the various functions of secretion, absorption, etc., composition and decomposition are perpetually going on ...”

“... the Indian population, and throughout the colonial era, with the French competing with the English for Indian loyalty, wholesale expropriation would have been politically counterproductive. Indeed, Banner argues, colonial governments and authorities in London generally tried to prevent settler intrusion onto Indian land before it had been ...”

“... for something else in the back pages of the impeccably learned (read: dry as dust) Review of English Studies for July 1949, there he was: ‘Frank Kermode’. Not, I was interested to note, ‘J.F. Kermode’ or any other variant that signalled the first name he never used. (It was one of the lesser indignities of his time in hospital during his final ...”

“... shy away from him, is evident in these two extracts. Enthusiasm is often judged bad form by the English, and Powell’s view of enthusiasm would no doubt accord with the etymological original: possession by a god, supernatural inspiration, prophetic or poetic ecstasy. Neither this, nor the boundless self-confidence which it appears to have given him, have ...”

“... still seeking God’s guidance. These lively middle-aged innocents of the 1980s seem like naughty English choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his ...”