“... were believed to stand outside and above Nedham’s kind of politics. But by the summer of 1650 Andrew Marvell was writing works that showed equivocal enthusiasm for the Cromwellian regime, and by 1654 – not without some apparent wobbles back to the royalist cause – he was composing panegyrics to Cromwell’s government. Milton, meanwhile, having set ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one particular disorder. In Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (2005) Andrew Lakoff writes about gene-hunting drug companies which want lots of spit and blood samples so they can try to match up a disease with DNA, devise a way to detect the malady through DNA markers and then find a new drug that will ameliorate the ...”

“... Bill Deedes, a kindly, urbane but ineffectual man, who boasted that he never gave anyone orders. Andrew Knight, former editor of the Economist and Black’s new chief executive and plenipotentiary in London, recommended Max Hastings as Deedes’s successor. Though only 40, Hastings was already an established military historian and a reporter of formidable ...”

“... to my non-existent novel. Initially I wanted to write a play about Alan Turing, the brilliant young mathematician who was brought to Bletchley Park from Cambridge during the war to work on Ultra, the decipherment of the German Enigma codes. He was one of the founding fathers of modern computers. He was a homosexual and suffered for it at the hands of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... give a man the power of the Spirit.’ In the presidential election contest of 1828 between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, a farmer asked which was ‘the best dictionary man?’ On being told it was Adams he declared his intention of voting for Jackson, on the grounds that ‘dictionary men’ get everything wrong. This strain of hostility to ...”

“... a ‘spoils system’ whereby party functionaries were rewarded with government jobs, and, in Andrew Jackson, a charismatic leader.The intense competition between Democrats and their rivals – the Whigs, and then Republicans – galvanised popular participation in politics. Political leaders became folk heroes, with nicknames like the Great Compromiser ...”

“... There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty historian Andrew Roberts; the Economist saluted the new edition as ‘impeccably postmodern’; 5000 free copies were distributed to schools, a Trojan horse for early indoctrination in traditional values that would be reinforced by emphatic TV explainers vamping through ...”

“... department wasn’t idle: in a recent essay in the Times, Douglas Murray, a director of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, took as a sign of our putative crisis over free speech the difficulty someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher ...”

“... being a trifle optimistic about Mann’s readers, even the observant ones. Still, it is true, as Andrew Weber suggests in the same volume, that homosexuality in Mann’s work has a ‘sheer recursive persistence’ which ‘gives it the structure and substance of real passion’. And this oblique passion, endlessly suffered and never indulged, is what we ...”