“... at the voluble impudence of some passages, the suddenness of the comic assault. But there is very little innocent laughter in this book. The prevailing tone is the giggling of the vicious, beside which the crackling of thorns under a pot is a pleasantly musical sound; and it is a melancholy thing to see, in the space of a hundred and eighty pages, a writer ...”

“... comparable to Pinkerton’s. Furthermore, they worked chiefly on divorce and libel cases, taking little part in the investigation of crime, and so didn’t figure much in the press. In fiction, however, they were paramount. Here they eclipsed outlaw heroes of folk tradition – Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, Dick Sheppard – and usurped the leadership of the ...”

“... which first aired on 24 November 1962, presented by David Frost. With the cancelling of that show little more than a year later, ostensibly on the grounds that it interfered with the BBC’s duty of impartiality in the run-up to the 1964 election, the heyday of anti-establishment comedy was already over. Yet its influence on British radio and television has ...”

“... manuscript: a tissue of clues, linguistic and palaeographical.The language of the poems is full of little geolocating tells, which reveal that the manuscript was copied in a dialect of Middle English specific to the South-East Cheshire and North-East Staffordshire border. (The poet’s dialect is thought to be from a ...”

“... the politics of an earlier era. Martin Pugh’s own monograph on the Fourth Reform Act,* too little noticed when it was published, is a case in point, and one can go back to that book in illustrating his method, using electoral reform as a special case. From 1867 Britain operated a system of household suffrage, at first confined to boroughs but extended ...”

“... at birth, who goes on to discover that he is his own non-existent, royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge ...”

“... at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness. Newbolt’s is a close little face, the small mouth primly clenched over an aggressively cloven chin, the brows knitted in a frown which seems to tell less of imperial visions than of inner worries and embarrassments. It is the kind of face to whose owner a bank manager might think ...”

“... amateurs, they developed professional skills at a time when university professionals took little interest in vernacular scholarship. They mostly earned their livings in other clerkly trades, as journalists, parliamentary reporters or lawyers. In their spare time they collected 16th and 17th-century books and manuscripts, learned booty which was much ...”

“... by planting up corridors to join existing woods together, because (apart from birds) there is little evidence they can use them. As for planting trees in an attempt to stop climate change, given the size of Britain, ‘exhorting people to plant trees to sequester carbon dioxide is like telling them to drink more to hold down rising sea levels’. And ...”

“... much of his early years producing cartoons for tapestries to hang in the royal apartments. The little scenes of everyday life he incorporated were novel, but he found the process a demeaning check on his invención. In 1800 he refused to co-operate with the latest tapestry commission, insisting that he was a painter of ‘histories and figures’.In ...”

“... to become interested in my pale “Uncle Octave”,’ Yourcenar reports. Nevertheless, she made a little study of this neglected essayist – and of his beloved brother, Rémo, a melancholy young radical who shot himself (to the music of Tannhaüser) in the 1870s, at the age of 28. As with the case of Gaston the Simple, the family kept quiet about the manner ...”

“... I’ll have another cigarette/And curse Sir Walter Ralegh,/He was such a stupid get.’ This is a little unfair to Sir Walter, who was not in fact the first person to bring tobacco (or indeed potatoes) back from the New World. Nor is it very likely he threw down his cloak so that Queen Elizabeth could step over a puddle. But his career – described with ...”

“... of the Reformed or Calvinist strand of Protestantism. Small wonder that the English bishops felt a little upstaged by the Genevans. Queen Elizabeth herself overcame her distaste, apparently appreciating her presentation Geneva Bible, bound in black and silver thread, enough to write her own extended pious commendation of ‘the pleasant fields of the holy ...”

“... published in 1609 was the only edition in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and it seems to have generated little interest: so little that a second edition, published in 1640, was able to imply that the poems had never been printed before. Perhaps the sonnets were simply not considered worth including. The editorial history of ...”

“... Empire. (‘Pater’s England,’ Donoghue writes, ‘is not the country as given; on that, he has little purchase.’) Pater seemed to be suggesting in his infamous Conclusion that we have nothing to redeem but our moments of pleasure, and nothing to do beyond the having of special, pleasurable experiences. Life was about intensity and not achievement, about ...”