“... the military paradigm. The author calls Byron in aid. ‘What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dress, their banners and their art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.’ It hardly needed Byron to tell us that. ‘Terrible as an army with banners,’ runs the biblical ...”

“... publishable. We keep everything, not in the expectation that it will one day end up in Barnes & Noble, but because we know from experience that it might prove useful to jog a memory, fashion a scene or recall a character. I don’t know a single writer who spends time rummaging through their boxes looking for things to burn. There is certain to be a great ...”

“... the way he tried to maintain a prideful independence in public affairs, as if he were the last noble soul in a governing class captured by ambition and greed. Many contemporaries suspected him of reactionary conservatism, or at least nostalgia for the Ancien Régime – a charge Tocqueville always denied. But some of his more recent defenders, among them ...”

“... is blown by a tornado. Below me, fields level out to clouded grass. St Michael’s Tower – noble and lonely as the last chess-piece on the board. How I could hug a man like this! Fred D’Aguiar is garrulous. He has plenty to write about (racism, the police, exile and homecoming, the bombardments of Englishness) but not enough artistry. His ...”

“... a letter to her friend Lady Ridgway, who had told her that she prefers prose. ‘How falls it out (noble lady),’ Southwell begins, ‘that you are become a sworn enemy to poetry?’ The publication of two of Southwell’s manuscripts, containing political poems, sonnets and other verse, in 1997 led to increased scholarly interest in her work, and she is now ...”

“... on the heights, Carlyle’s writing has something essentially unserious about it, as of a man (so Andrew Lang remarked) ‘talking angrily and vehemently to himself’. When he was still young, Carlyle confessed in his notebooks that the world had lost its solidity for him. ‘I attend to few things as I was wont: few things have any interest for me; I live ...”

“... the man who has the best claim to have founded our modern idea of the royal family. The reader of Andrew Roberts’s new biography rejoices too. In many ways, the king’s madness is the most interesting thing about a monarch who never included among his delusions the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan ...”

“... against those whose power is itself illegitimate, and who consider themselves above the law. Andrew Jack points out that Vladimir Putin belongs to a special, transitional generation. He was ‘born too late to share any of the Bolsheviks’ original ideals or struggles, but too soon to be fully inculcated with the culture of corruption and chaos which ...”

“... each other. Tennyson’s ode helped this idea along, foreseeing a day when all men working in noble brotherhood would break their mailed fleets and armed towers. Never was there such faith in the perfectibility of man. Certainly it was time to make some move towards that goal. Palmerston’s gunboats had only just finished blockading Greece in the Don ...”

“... craving for wealth and power, Leopold wanted to be a despot, not a minor constitutional king. Andrew Fitzmaurice deepens our understanding of the deviousness with which he created a colony in the Congo to funnel the profits of mass murder not to Belgium but to Leopold himself. Leopold knew that Belgium’s free-trading parliament would not tolerate the ...”

“... convicted paedophile.’ So much for Hill the inspiring teacher and widely admired college head. Andrew Roberts in the Daily Mail went so far as to assert, as though it were an established fact rather than wild fiction, that Hill had been unmasked as a ‘spy’ and had been ‘revealed as an “agent of influence” for Stalin’s USSR at the very time he ...”

“... of black families and barred whites entirely from the islands. Later that year, however, President Andrew Johnson, who took office after Lincoln’s assassination, ordered that the confiscated territory be returned to its owners. Butler and his daughter travelled to Georgia, hoping to put the former slaves back to work, but soon complained about their ...”

“... had a sort of feminine delicacy to it; he had blond hair, wavy in nature, which outlined his pale, noble brow so picturesquely … However blond his hair was, his whiskers and eyebrows were black – the mark of breeding in a person … To complete the portrait, I will tell you that he had a slightly upturned nose. Natasha Randall’s English, in her new ...”

“... exclude technology, Patriotism Appeal and the royal sod. They have on the whole excluded Kipling. Andrew Rutherford’s 1971 Penguin selection tried to smuggle him in by putting the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this ...”

“... to repudiate the past and make a new start.’ Of course, that doesn’t always come as good news. Andrew Sanders’s brisk and engaging dash through the reactions of Dickens, Carlyle, Thackeray, Macaulay, and heaven help us, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, shows just how rapidly British middle-of-the-road opinion could slide into Podsnappian condemnation of ...”