“... these 16 years, and although his voice was often recorded it now seems difficult to describe it. John Haffenden says he had one voice for poetry and another for prose. Empson himself thought ‘the reader should throw himself into the verse, and not do it with “reserved” English good taste.’ The best idea was to ham it ‘like a provincial Shakespeare ...”

“... the late 1500s that it began to be theorised in terms of gender. Feminine rhyme was ‘sweeter’, John Harington wrote in 1591, in the preface to his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. It could also be comic, as Christopher Marlowe realised when writing his Hero and Leander two years later – a poem which, in describing the beauty of Leander’s ...”

“... Union movement, whose passivity when confronted with the infamous conduct of Foulkes, Haxell, Fraser and the rest of the Communist conspiracy devastatingly proclaimed a comfortable, institutional mediocrity of mind. This neglect placed between the Electricians and the TUC a two-stream gulf of guilty resentment, on the one hand, and rebarbative ...”

“... star) above two of them, Sabatini was not only a ‘history-teller,’ as George MacDonald Fraser defines his art in a foreword to The Fortunes of Casanova, but one who delighted in a spot of swashbuckling. At the same time he was recognised as a serious historian who had published authoritative biographies of Torquemada and Cesare Borgia. He was born ...”

“... last night with Malcolm and Kitty. We took with us our enterprising and appealing grandson Benjie Fraser, aged 22, and his enchanting girlfriend, still at St Paul’s. She is the daughter of Caroline (née Blackwood) by her second husband, a Polish musician. Caroline was married earlier to Lucian [sic] Freud and by her third marriage to the illustrious ...”

“... of many sorts: double-crossing, spying for both sides and agile switches of allegiance.Simon Fraser of Beaufort, the rainmaker behind the Scotch Plot of 1703, was a double agent: he was the Jacobite court-in-exile’s prime conspirator north of the border, but was also willing to share intelligence with the Duke of Queensberry, who headed Queen Anne’s ...”

“... seal-fur sporran, had I been able (aged nine) to find out from such a book as this latest work of John Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF ...”

“... be said to have much influence beyond its own politically well-defined readership. Perhaps, as Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, pointed out recently, it is otiose for people to complain about the influence of newspapers when none of the broadsheets is read by more than 1 per cent of the adult population and even the Mail reaches only 3 per ...”

“... would respond to such behaviour in a small town. In fact, there is a ‘here-where’ poem by G.S. Fraser discussing the response: Here, where the women wear dark shawls and mutter   A hasty word as other women pass, Telling the secret, telling, clucking and tutting,   Sighing or saying that it served her right, The bitch! However, Douglas Dunn’s ...”

“... present to the best advantage the results of thesis work. The general editor of this series, Derek Fraser, and the editors of the respective volumes, represent the post-Dyos wave of British urban historians; they in their turn have sponsored the third generation, the authors whose theses are rewritten here. David Cannadine edits four essays on England’s ...”

“... success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ...”

“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”

“... the dark gentleman ever to speak of it, but it bears a resemblance to that of Queen Victoria and John Brown, her favourite ghillie. Barbara Cartland, of course, could have made something of it. She was very pre-Oprah, and pre-Diana (her step-granddaughter), in believing it quite jolly for gels to be independent and bolters and all that, so long as they ...”

“... It included such early classics as R.S.R. Fitter on the natural history of London, and Frank Fraser Darling on the Scottish Highlands. Rackham has all their verve and learning, the same immediacy in the telling, but an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It is ...”

“... seemed the next best possibility. He was appointed as an overseer and then manager on one of the Fraser estates, where more than three hundred enslaved men, women and children laboured to produce cotton, not sugar, on the swampy, muddy land. His father soon authorised him to buy six ‘negroes’ for £500 and congratulated William on this first step to ...”