“... distaff, they knew their stuff. Mary Dawdon of Masham in Yorkshire gave eleven pounds of yarn to James Thompson in August 1695, but when he returned the finished product she was sure he had cheated her. ‘[It] being fine wool she did expect to have again eight yards of fine cloth, the list of the said run web being all white, but … Thompson did bring ...”

“... trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically attributed collection ...”

“... part is the Irish word dáire, meaning ‘wooded island’. The London prefix dates from 1613 when James 1 granted a charter to the Society of Governors and Assistants, London, of the New Plantation of Ulster, known then and now as the Honourable The Irish Society. The Hon. The Irish Society was strictly a business proposition, like the East India Company, and ...”

“... 2013 of industrial-scale spying by Western intelligence agencies on their own citizens, thanks to Edward Snowden’s release of thousands of files purloined from the NSA. The reason most of the first wave of Snowden shocks appeared in the Guardian (the Washington Post shared in the early revelations) was that the previous year Rusbridger had poached Glenn ...”

“... in its everyday susceptibility to invasion by outside forces. Cowper, like Mansfield Park after Edward Said’s reading and Patricia Rozema’s movie, will never be the same again, and we will wonder why we never saw him this way before. Some of the best parts of Favret’s book are about the pervasive metaphorisation of military violence in the vocabulary ...”

“... defined the ‘atmosphere in the cab’, they often date badly. The student of elevator scenes in James Bond movies, for example, will discover only that while Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace (2008) instantly unleashes a crisply definitive, neoliberal backwards head-butt, Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) has to absorb a good deal of heavy ...”

“... because they too were Protestants. So are the contributions of other revivalists, such as James Joyce, a Catholic nationalist who loathed the Church because of its condemnation of the nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell after he became embroiled in a divorce scandal in 1890. Separation from the UK was not the objective of most revivalists, who ...”

“... been commissioned by Harold Wilson in 1969, to head off the Scottish nationalists. At the time, Edward Heath was already proposing a Scottish Assembly, but the arrival of Margaret Thatcher on the scene decisively quenched the feeble flicker of devolutionary spirit in the Tory Party. In the event, both Wilson and Thatcher agreed with Kilbrandon, that – in ...”

“... cure within a decade, met its political goal of pre-empting a similar initiative pushed by Senator Edward Kennedy, but as a technical achievement left much to be desired. It was simply premature in the Seventies to hold any realistic hope of addressing the fundamental nature of cancers, since the necessary biological methods were only just then being ...”

“... She could have learned etching from Sickert, always generous to beginners, or have worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they ...”

“... comedy of ‘The Secret Sharer’. Conrad, who used on occasion to vie with his friend and agent Edward Garnett in yarn-spinning, told him that his tale ‘between you and me, is it ... every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note. Luck my boy. Pure luck.’ The sense of fitness was what most impressed D.H. Lawrence, who observed of one of the ...”

“... He had first backed the firm into a publicly-listed company in a reverse takeover: that is, James Ferguson Holdings, the smaller company, bought Barlow Clowes Group, the larger company, paying Peter Clowes in shares; he thus became the largest shareholder in the company and controlled it. Clowes then used this vehicle to try and take over two public ...”

“... is to choose a strong narrative line, which means travelling light when it comes to what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’. The other is to put together a portrait ‘from the life’, which is what Parker has done. This book is not, primarily, about Isherwood’s career, but about Isherwood. And Isherwood was all about Isherwood. His ...”

“... in the American South. In this wave of iconoclasm, Cecil Rhodes, Silent Sam, Robert E. Lee and Edward Colston were practically surrogates for each other in a transnational story of empire, colonialism and slavery – a story that demanded retelling with renewed attention to its victims. Like some businesses, churches and government agencies, universities ...”

“... he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to England, he ‘lived the life of a rat’ for twenty years; he was eventually arrested in Bristol, accused of forgery and transported to Van Diemen’s Land. After causing maximum offence with a series of satirical paintings ...”