“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lacked a crucial tattoo on his arm. He was probably in fact a butcher’s son from Wapping called Arthur Orton, who had ended up in Wagga Wagga, had seen the advertisements seeking the Tichborne heir, and had taken advantage of a mother’s grief. The story ‘had everything: toffs, Catholics, money, sex, mistaken identity, an inheritance, High Court ...”

“... Yes I’d eat you!                     In a nice little, white little, soft little, tender little, Juicy little, right ...”

“... killed me!’ Barbara Comyns’s daughter, Caroline, recognised her younger self in Fanny, the little girl who dies of scarlet fever in Comyns’s second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. ‘Poor, beautiful little Fanny! her life had been wasted because of stupidity and poverty.’ On its first publication in ...”

“... seldom) thoughts on life. I stopped around 1990, by which time I’d accumulated 30 or so of these little hardbacked books with marbled covers. Today, barren of inspiration or any inclination to do anything better, I start to transcribe and even index them. In the process I’m reminded of one of the reasons I stopped, which was that so ...”

“... he criticises. Immediately after reproaching cultural leftists for not accepting Sidney Hook and Arthur Schlesinger as heroes of the American Left, for instance, he reminds us that one of them boasted of voting for Nixon and the other lied through his teeth about the Bay of Pigs. He urges fellow Americans to be patriotic, despite the obvious murderousness of ...”

“... of their brother as a very modern man, in favour of science, not God. They are impressed and a little wary. He became rather disillusioned with science in later life and a bit less dogmatic. I wonder what Clara Collet would have made of the youthful Gissing’s lectures to his brother: ‘A girl’s education should be of a very general & liberal ...”

“... of Brown to focus his magnum opus on a baby’s face. The model for the child was his own son, Arthur, born in 1856. Work became in part an elaborate memorial for the boy, who died before he was a year old. Brown, at a low point in his uncertain fortunes, had to borrow money to pay for his funeral. Throughout his long and laborious life, Brown remained a ...”

“... have existed if independence had not made possible an intermediate stage of industrial protection. Arthur Griffith, the apostle of Irish separatism in the first two decades of the century and the first leader of an independent Irish government, was surely right to have made a period of industrial protection a crucial plank of his nationalist platform. The ...”

“... causes left’? Until the birth of the English Stage Company, the post-war British theatre was, as Arthur Miller has said, ‘hermetically sealed off from life’ – and from the American theatre. When Look Back in Anger was produced Miller had written Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and All My Sons, Tennessee Williams The Glass ...”