“... the last American Presidential contest. This import-import business started in 1952 when a certain John Profumo – then the Tories’ media man – visited the US during the Presidential election and came back dazzled by what he had seen. It was, he wrote to the Party Chairman on his return, ‘absolutely essential to get all our people on all the programmes ...”

“... A super computer is programmed with every known fact about Byron: especially all the material in Leslie Marchand’s edition of the letters and Jerome McGann’s annotated edition of the poems. Thus loaded, it is interrogated on the grounds that the internal interactions of this data will create an artificially intelligent ‘Byron’ who can be conversed ...”

“... her personal character’. James’s view was not untypical of the masculine response of the time. Leslie Stephen, a friend and near-contemporary of Mrs Gaskell, regarded her achievements in much the same light as he would have done those of his own daughter; and Jenny Uglow is surely right to stress the implicit comeback in the Gaskell novels, which show them ...”

“... Another time he had given up because his ‘work fell so far short of the standards set by Leslie Stephen’. But I suspect he was amused by a young man’s persistence and when, eventually, the proof stage of one volume was reached, he would call at the office, listen to my trivial comments, courteously accepting some of them, and then take me out to ...”

“... intellectuals included some famous names: Bryce, Courtney, Freeman, Lecky, Lowe, J.S. Mill, John Morley. A nervous concern about the consequences of mass franchise, worries about the concessionary mood of the Liberal leaders – especially in the face of violence in Ireland – led many Late Victorian Liberal intellectuals to drift rightwards toward ...”

“... liberalism would have written an important book. At first sight, this seems to be what Leslie Mitchell has set out to do. His title suggests a book about the house and its role, not a mere biographical study of its two most famous occupants. He writes of the house as if it had views and opinions of its own. He prefers a thematic to a chronological ...”

“... and returning.’ This observation comes not from Ulverton but from the penultimate page of Leslie Dick’s second novel, Kicking. The thematic connection seems obvious enough, but the exhumations in Dick’s book are exclusively psychological – buried memories pulled up by the root in a willed act of recollection which is triggered by a dream and a ...”

“... in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, and doubtless elsewhere). Two centuries ago, when John Debrett became a miscellaneous publisher, his contemporary advice-givers had moved on to new fields; for example, offering a tip or two to a young lady newly ravaged by smallpox on how to hold on to her lover, with complementary advice to a gallant robbed of ...”

“... He drew further attention by associating himself with the reckless Pittis, who (his Whig enemy John Tutchin said) ‘never fights but when he’s drunk, nor then neither; but when his Welch printer’s with him, to fetch him off again’. Pittis didn’t write the Memorial, though some thought he did. As well as the follow-ups that landed him in ...”

“... its making so little of the other ascribed poem in Rawlinson 160: the Epitaph on Elias James. As Leslie Hotson showed some years ago, Shakespeare had links with a brewer of that name during his sojourn near St Andrew by the Wardrobe. Doubtless the Oxford editors felt that a single unfamiliar poem was as much as the public would swallow at once, but sagacious ...”

“... described a typically bourgeois sense of insecurity when she recalled the attitude of her father, Leslie Stephen, to money: ‘Not all his mathematics together with a bank balance which he insisted must be ample in the extreme, could persuade him, when it came to writing a cheque, that the whole family was not “shooting Niagara to ruin”.’ The ruling ...”

“... which Dyer makes from London to Stonehenge. A sign of the times, by the way, that both Ackroyd and John Fowles, in his latest novel, should send their Georgian creations crawling about Stonehenge, which not long ago would have seemed one of the purest un-Augustan activities. Ackroyd has taken Hawksmoor’s known interest in pre-Gothic architectural theory and ...”

“... the wake of the couple’s acrimonious separation. Byron’s side of the story went up in smoke in John Murray’s grate when the poet’s publisher presided over the burning of his memoirs. If we want Byron’s relationships with those who knew him, why should we not just read his often wonderful letters? One answer might be that ...”

“... over the business and continues to run it (she is described as ‘a blend of Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron’). Inge’s suffering when Feltrinelli went underground is vividly recounted, however. Sibilla, the young fourth wife who lived in a ménage à trois with Inge and Giangiacomo, is also treated with some affection. Feltrinelli’s enemies, from the ...”

“... struck by lightning’. To Froude, he was ‘a Calvinist without the theology’, Scotland’s new John Knox, ‘whose voice was like the sounding of ten thousand trumpets’. In the 1830s fashionable London had been spellbound by his charismatic presence and his inspirational brew of fire and brimstone. He taught that right is might and might is light and ...”