“... the whole story. Hence Gillray’s serial return to certain characters – Charles Fox, Napoleon, George III, the Prince of Wales, Burke, Sheridan and Pitt. The motive, the posture, the degree of deplorable wheedling would shift even as the character stayed the same.An earlier biographer, Draper Hill, judged that Gillray had ‘lifted his calling from a trade ...”

“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned ...”

“... closet Catholicism, republicanism, even as late as 1797 the antiquaries could be denounced by George III as a ‘Popish cabal’. Still, they stuck to the motto associated with their emblem, the bronze Lamp of Knowledge: non exstinguere, it ‘shall not be extinguished’. The Lamp, which is ‘curious’ – to use a favourite antiquarian adjective ...”

“... on our range of sexual satisfactions. At first glance, the enterprise looks promising. Didn’t Blake and Shelley believe in free love? Didn’t Coleridge and Southey plan to establish a liberationist commune in America? Didn’t Byron and Hazlitt write with startling candour about sex? On closer inspection, things are more tricky. Whatever their views on ...”

“... of a music lesson taught by William Byrd, a history of English poetry in the manner of one of Blake’s prophetic books, and a perambulation of London in which Hogarth repeats passages of The Analysis of Beauty and marches Timothy through the scenes of his engravings of London life. Most compendious and extraordinary of all, there is a kaleidoscopic ...”

“... is invented when reticence goes over to the attack, and becomes mystification. If you visited Blake and were told not to sit on a certain chair because it was for the spirit of Michelangelo, or if Emily Dickinson handed you a single flower, you needed time to find out how far the mystification was meant to keep you at a distance, and to give you something ...”

“... or so articles, incorporating most of the best of his critical work, he re-reads poems by Keats, Blake, Coleridge, Christina Rossetti and other 19th-century writers, as both a critical interpreter and a cultural historian who pays unusually close attention to format and circumstance. Working in the American academy, McGann responds to its changing ...”

“... I had pursued more energetically the quest for papers at Belvoir Castle (Lord John Manners and George Smythe), Weston Park (Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield) and Windsor Castle, where there apparently still exists a notable private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps some of ...”

“... he didn’t object to being teased about his ‘humble origins’ by the Hollywood director George Cukor, who to rub it in once sent a green Rolls-Royce to chauffeur him along Sunset Boulevard to Cukor’s house. The two became friends while working on an ill-fated film (later described as one of ‘the most expensive flops in movie history’) called ...”

“... Catholics, those of the Albigensians and of Joachim of Flora, and, among Protestants, those of George Fox and William Blake. It is this as much as its archaeological interest that gives the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices, and with it this account of some of the contents, its ...”

“... is devoted to the Commonwealth era, and to Milton and Winstanley, Lilburne and other Levellers, George Fox and other sectaries. Part Five is on ‘The Age of Revolution and Total War, 1789-1848’. Midway through this Shelley was writing of ‘the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns’; in today’s world he would only need to ...”

“... to factor in the need for a clean air act, or want to commiserate about the bad weather, as George VI did when he looked at John Piper’s drawings of Windsor Castle. You are struck by the observation of things that had not been seen before, or seen rarely, in pictures: things like the backs of the South London houses where Carel Weight set odd ...”

“... had been painted on deliberately. He also suggested that the initials ‘S.B.’ stood for Sexton Blake, which is rhyming slang for ‘fake’, and was the monogram used by the forger Tom Keating, after he got caught, to indicate his own work. I think the framer was expecting me to be disappointed, but I was thrilled. The picture is not as old as I ...”

“... it would be better still if its subject had been defined with more clarity and force. Carretta’s George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron has a clearly identified subject but does not completely work as a book. This is not for want of appeal and variety in the matter. George III figured prominently in the ...”

“... in Ottawa in 1913. She was in London before the Second World War and read, in a bookshop, some of George Barker’s poems. She fell for him in print. This was a visitation of love as the ancients knew about it, a sudden incurable and unconquerable malady. Or that was how it seemed to the victim, and how she presents it to us. She got to know Barker, who was ...”