“... business. His sisters were no ordinary country girls. The family’s guardian and relative Andrew Cusack, a draper in the town, arranged for them to be sent as boarders up to Dublin to be educated in Padraig Pearse’s experimental school, St Ita’s. This was an extraordinary decision for any family in Ireland at that time, even more so for one from ...”

“... he met another recent graduate, Douglas Carswell, and convinced him to join the cause. The three young men – born in 1970 or 1971 – had certain similarities in their personal histories. Hannan and Carswell spent their childhoods in faraway, politically disturbed countries as the children of British expatriates: Hannan’s family had a poultry farm in ...”

“... that their love had been allowed to blossom. Brown is forgivably sceptical: ‘Had this impetuous young woman really managed to hide her feelings for a full five and a half years? And had the group captain somehow exercised a similar restraint?’In a footnote, Brown adds a recollection from the princess’s chauffeur, John Larkin, who asked her whether she ...”

“... jazz/blues record – Bessie Smith’s classic ‘St Louis Blues’ from 1925, which featured a young Louis Armstrong playing cornet.This collision of models meant that Tippett’s music tended to develop through rupture and disjoint: the idea of combining disparate strands to form a neatly arranged whole never appealed to him. The English musical ...”

“... with: ‘both father and son were successful, self-made businessmen.’ Whether​ as a budding young entrepreneur or an aspiring young actor – or quite possibly a mix of the two – Shakespeare’s move to London was a key event in his life. We have no precise date for this; it’s perhaps unnecessary to think of it as ...”

“... drama narrated in the Sonnets and involving two personalities as well as the poet’s: the ‘fair young man’ and the ‘dark lady’. For a very long time – this approach still dominates at least the more conservative or biographical criticism – the Sonnets have been read as telling some kind of love story, the objects a man and a woman (Sonnets ...”

“... on how to behave improperly, according to the new times and mores. That dama must even bed a young becado (a grantee of the Revolution) and let her ‘thighs enact the struggle of the contraries’. Reid has an elegant phrase to sum up this battle of the sexes that begins and ends in a clash of classes: ‘Take a scholar to bed.’ Turning the becado ...”

“... the diaspora has cultivated a harmless minority identity through Burns Clubs and mutual-help St Andrew Societies. Only in the last 30 years has there been an upsurge of enthusiasm for ‘Scottish heritage’, a spreading craze in North America and Europe which is all about kilts, Highland Games and gruesome invented ceremonies like ‘The Kirkin’ o’ the ...”

“... years before Todd published his thoughts on Charlie. It was unceremoniously buried in 2004, when young Muslim women were forbidden to cover their heads in schools. Since the Charlie Hebdo murders, it has become the bad object festering at the back of national consciousness, just as secularism remains the sacred object in the foreground. Todd describes ...”

“... bohemian life – society misunderstands, ignores – faithless, feckless wife – dies young, in poverty – the Unmarked Grave. And this picture has of late been injected with new life and massively disseminated by the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, whose veneer of shocking realism and occasional flights of pure fancy hardly conceal its ...”

“... their Glasgow and Edinburgh lecture rooms Smith and Blair were busy translating their audiences. Andrew Hook has drawn attention to the widespread use of Blair’s Rhetoric in the United States. By the early 1760s, the Scotsman William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh ...”

“... revealed to be the dreary stuff of common knowledge. Faced with my archival fire-power, these new young soccer bores don’t even blink: ‘Who doesn’t know of Bovington, Boyce, Brabrook, Bond et al,’ they say. ‘And as for all those Garys you’re so keen on, why not make up two teams of them, plus subs? Let’s see now: Ablett, Bennett, Brookes ...”

“... by Bulwer Lytton’s biographer, Michael Sadleir. Bulwer had been mercilessly satirised by the young Thackeray. It was payback time. The family decided in 1939 to authorise a Life based on the literary remains Annie had preserved (with a little dutiful pruning of the naughty bits) and chose as their appointed biographer a 24-year-old American, Gordon ...”

“... for many generations. They were part of the Grosvenor (later Westminster) estate left by the young heiress Mary Davies in the 17th century, together with the Mayfair lands which were the first to be exploited. The story of poor addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major ...”

“... respectful attention to death and resurrection in the novelist’s work. Coincidentally, in 1982, Andrew Sanders’s Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist was published. Dickens was the subject of Garrett Stewart’s previous book, and is the main author discussed in Death Sentences. But his line is different from Sanders’s, who locates the Dickensian ...”