“... herbarium and mineral and zoological collections, he passed the letter on to the young James Smith, who happened to be taking breakfast with him, and suggested he ask his father to buy them for him. Mr Smith obliged, and the Linnean Society was born. But against this – and by that time Banks was much engaged with other business – one can set ...”

“... the government hand-picked the panel members – led by the formidable Sir Peter Gross, a former lord justice of appeal – and drafted its terms of reference. The review received and analysed thousands of pages of evidence from legal experts, politicians, NGOs, the general public and the president of the European Court of Human Rights. It hosted roadshow ...”

“... Reading this Life of Lloyd George is like watching one of those old James Cagney movies where it’s established early on that the protagonist isn’t simply an anti-hero but, for all that he’s lionised, an irredeemable villain. The fun comes from watching him get away with all sorts of caddishness early on and then carry on the virtuoso act long after everyone has got his number ...”

“... unable to raise the revenue to pay the crews. After the Restoration in 1660, both Charles II and James II demonstrated enthusiasm and expertise in nurturing naval expansion. But the Royal Navy’s performance in the Second and Third Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled William III and the Dutch fleet ...”

“... be a writer. When he abandons his Bible in the Black Country, one of the first things he buys is James Baldwin’s Another Country – a book to which Rainbow Milk is deeply indebted. There’s also an implication that Jesse’s sex work isn’t altogether alien from the writerly life to which he aspires. Virginie Despentes makes the case for the resemblance ...”

“... that she will always be beholden to you, however you behave. Conscious or unconscious, such was James Joyce’s strategy with regard to Dublin, to Ireland. From the age of 22 until his death at 58 he lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Switzerland and France, but his creative attention remained focused on the Dublin he grew up in. Though he spoke ...”

“... success, academic honours and large royalty cheques. The heavy price which novelists since Henry James had had to pay for being labelled as experimental artists was, it seemed, no longer being exacted. Robert Coover, born in 1932, certainly has no reason to complain of neglect. ‘America’s most outrageous novelist presents a new, wildly comic and erotic ...”

“... The population is praised for puffing its way stoically through the shrieking pieties of King James I, whose pamphlet on the matter warned loyal subjects that it was ‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs’. The tendency of those in authority to show who’s in charge by issuing no-smoking ...”

“... only be imitated by a copyist who dispenses with the usual patient diligence. Reynolds’s pupil James Northcote described to Hazlitt ‘a whole-length portrait by Velázquez, that seemed done while the colours were yet wet; every thing was touched in, as it were, by a wish; there was such a power that it thrilled through your whole frame.’ Reynolds was ...”

“... insanity in an English courtroom, but the case that really launches his narrative is that of James Hadfield, who on 15 May 1800 was arrested in the Drury Lane Theatre after firing a pistol at George III as he was blowing a kiss to his subjects from the royal box. There was no question that Hadfield had acted with deadly intent. He had loaded his pistols ...”

“... the contents of Mitford’s parcel were emptied out onto the table, the collector – one Thomas James Wise – recognised the momentous find and bought all dozen copies.So the story went, at any rate. But the entire tale – sausages and all – was made up by Wise. In reality the book didn’t exist before 1893, when Wise himself had forged it, concocting ...”

“... a customs job and four sons of his own, Ferguson found himself drawn into the political machine of Lord North (Tua in the Gaelic code of its northern branch). The election of 1780 saw Ferguson active in the campaign to unseat George Dempster, the independent Member for the Perth grouping of burghs, who had supported economic reform and Dunning’s recent ...”

“... breathes something of that ‘air of reality (solidity of specification)’ which seemed to Henry James ‘the supreme virtue of a novel – the merit on which all its other merits ... helplessly and submissively depend’. Unfortunately, that one – Pat Barker’s The Century’s Daughter – is also a consciously ‘working-class’ fiction whose claim to ...”

“... vulnerability of the kind of flawed hero whose archetype is the Biblical prophet Jeremiah. (‘Oh Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived ... I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me ... But if I say “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and ...”

“... rejected, and at some point in 1705 or early 1706, he left Scotland. ‘There is no evidence,’ James Buchan writes, ‘he ever returned.’ Law was born in 1671, the son of William Law, a master goldsmith who, like other goldsmiths of his time, drifted from metallurgy into finance, becoming a lender to clients. Success in this sphere enabled the purchase ...”