“... since 1946. When these interrogation techniques were investigated by an inquiry headed by Lord Parker, two reports were issued. Parker’s majority report justified the use of sensory deprivation, claiming that it provided the authorities with ‘much-needed information about the terrorists’, while Lord Gardiner’s ...”

“... of the offenders by the victims. On one occasion, a planned highway robbery went wrong because William Smorthwait and Edward Bainbridge spent so long in an alehouse that their intended victim rode on by and home, causing them the inconvenience of having to attempt the burglary of a house full of people in order to gain the prize they had missed on the ...”

“... some of the divisions operating within the landed class. Its prime gentry heroine, Elizabeth Parker of Alkincoats, later Elizabeth Shackleton, is shown moving among a wide array of lesser landed, trading and professional acquaintances. But, as Vickery points out, she was ‘not on visiting terms with noble families, not even with the holders of lesser ...”

“... a former rebel and friendly pamphleteering rival of Defoe’s – described how two brothers, William and Benjamin Hewling, who had fought at Sedgemoor, fled by sea but ‘were driven back again, and with the hazard of their lives got on shore (over dangerous rocks), where they saw the country filled with soldiers, and they being unwilling to fall into ...”

“... Van Dine’s famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that ...”

“... to play Nora in The Doll’s House would never be fulfilled without recourse to surgery. Dorothy Parker sniffed that she had cut off her nose to spite her race, but Brice was just trying to enlarge her repertoire. Things may be thought different now: Barbra Streisand has climbed the heights of Hollywood stardom without a nose job. Her big movie ...”

“... public places – magenta Rugosa roses in odd corners, yellow standard roses in our square garden, William Allen Richardson pink climbers on the pergola overlooking the crematorium, favourite meeting place for nursemaids and prams. (“There goes another poor soul!” as a column of brown smoke rose in the still air.)’ This passage not only shows Jean ...”

“... even distractions from it, rival it in interest and passion. It reminds me a little of William Gass’s tiny masterpiece, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (‘and I am in retirement from love’), which I imagine Lydia Davis must have known; and a little, too, of Botho Strauss’s novella Die Widmung, which hardly anyone knows in ...”

“... on his own work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to ...”

“... of all Byron’s doxies’. He quotes Byron’s own reminiscence of his cousin, Margaret Parker, ‘one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings’, only to round off the paragraph by observing that Margaret Parker ‘took evanescence to the limit by dying’. Biographer and subject could hardly be closer in step ...”

“... we have come to expect: ‘Christina ... began writing with her 22-carat gold broad-nibbed Parker Duofold pen.’ The artful book-jacket keys us in: a string of pearls, a pair of sunglasses, four wedding rings for four farcical marriages; a scarlet lipstick; the dented tops of two bottles of Diet Coca-Cola. (Diet Coke was Christina’s favourite ...”

“... and Margaret Biddulph, Rodmarton was finished in 1929, having been built over thirty years on William Morris principles of handwork. The materials were local as were the builders and furnishers, who produced joinery for the timber framing, needlework and metalwork. It was a reinvention of the country house as social force, ‘a quiet attempt to change the ...”

“... from his voyage aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841-42 and from authoritative texts ranging from William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), through encyclopedia entries, to Frederick Bennett’s Narrative of a Whaling Voyage round the Globe (1840). King tests this information against up-to-the-minute data from modern marine science. It turns ...”

“... was responsible (both ‘Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London’ and ‘Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool’ feature as husband to ‘Jane Austen of Steventon’).In January 1796, Austen wrote to Cassandra about Thomas Lefroy, the man it has been speculated she hoped to marry. She teases Cassandra with an account of their behaviour at a ...”

“... It was completed after his death (in 1852) by another architectural historian, John Henry Parker, who also drew on it for Our English Home: Its Early History and Progress (1860). Despite this encouraging start, the emergence in the later 19th and early 20th centuries of modern history as a university subject did nothing to advance the study of ...”