“... Defoe in his fiction was ‘their contempt of all the world but themselves’.) The Irish peer, Lord George Macartney, arriving on a trade mission and bearing gifts for the Emperor Qianlong from King George III (1793), was so impressed by the strong, diligent stevedores, ‘singing and roaring all the while’, and the healthy and agile women (who had ...”

“... suggests otherwise. Long before I met him, Peter was intrigued and outraged at the hanging of James Hanratty for the 1961 A6 murder. When I took the case up in the late Sixties he bombarded me with questions and offers of support. Sometime in 1978 I asked him if he would give away the prizes and draw the raffle at an Anti-Nazi League fête in North ...”

“... a worldwide celebrity, ranked as a thinker alongside Plato, Socrates, Descartes and Kant. William James thought Bergson’s work had wrought a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Lord Balfour read him with great care and attention; Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to write an article on his work. People climbed ladders ...”

“... is not much disagreement: in fact, as between Inglis and Tucker, there is mainly disagreement on Lord of the Rings, which for Inglis is schmaltz (Götterdämmerung for the fascistically-minded dispossessed), and for Tucker a valuable myth giving meaning to individual fantasies of achievement. On how books – good books – work, Inglis is bold and clear. He ...”

“... with the Egyptian ambassador’. Churchill’s publicity machine was often wildly insecure. When Lord Halifax was sent off as ambassador to the US, bogus baggage was placed on the Port Jackson at Liverpool to fool the Germans, and when it turned out that the Port Jackson wasn’t going to America, the baggage was transferred to the Warwick ...”

“... less celebrated, than those with which William Henry Ireland in the previous century had deceived James Boswell and many others, though not the great Shakespearean Edmond Malone (himself guilty of tampering with manuscripts). The men of this new age were scholars, working in a tradition often said to have originated with Malone and achieving, in the 20th ...”

“... the English faculty’s lecture list for Trinity term 1996, I find that the Professor of Poetry, James Fenton, will give a lecture on 9 May entitled Eliot v. Julius. It would be improper of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this ...”

“... won a new status for authorship, to befit the moral and educative role he claimed for it. Under James I the former bricklayer and soldier and brawler and convict, the one-time mediocre actor and hack adapter of other people’s plays, became the royal laureate, the friend of courtiers, diplomats and MPs, the honorand of universities. He was Britain’s ...”

“... not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations. Lord Palmerston, however, had less inclination to admire foreign models and none at all to adopt them. ‘Can you expect that the people of the United Kingdom will cast aside all the names of Space and weight and capacity which they learnt from their infancy and ...”

“... was that secrecy inevitably gave rise to corruption – ‘every thing secret degenerates,’ Lord Acton wrote. It was a ‘foreign’ trait, and in the form of covert surveillance, it was also believed to be counterproductive. Spying was supposed to sniff out unstable social elements, but stability depends on trust, and if people thought they were being ...”

“... by them. One example was familiar and acceptable to Charles Darwin: the successive offspring of Lord Morton’s mare. Crossed with a quagga (a now extinct zebra with stripes confined to neck and forequarters), the Arab mare delivered a hybrid with stripes in evidence. Subsequently mated with a black Arab stallion, the mare again produced an offspring ...”

“... camellias bloom at Christmas. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times; on his sixth attempt, in 1998, he ruptured a heart valve. Sark is the world’s first Dark Sky Island, benefiting from an absence of streetlights. Its leading politician became a powerboating world ...”

“... are caused by people wandering about. For example, the trial of the other Joyce – William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw – demonstrated that a man born in Brooklyn and brought up in Ireland could be hanged as a British traitor for war crimes committed in Germany. William Joyce and James Joyce had their British passports in ...”

“... felt they had to wait until they were better off. Some went ahead anyway. John Scott – a future lord chancellor, but in 1772 a 21-year-old Oxford student with vague plans to pursue a career in the church or at the bar – had no money to speak of and few prospects, and wasn’t at all the kind of son-in-law his sweetheart Elizabeth’s father had ...”

“... a man of letters. He is all combined; and perhaps he is something more.’In​ the 1830s, as James Secord has shown, scientific literature had become hugely popular with the reading public. In fiction, it was an interregnum between the age of poets, such as Poe’s hero Lord Byron, and the full flourishing of the ...”