“... outcomes such as the decline of Chartism or the nature of Labour politics. Joyce and his student James Vernon then charged Lawrence and Taylor with a ‘complacent’ desire to appropriate the tools of linguistic analysis while undermining its epistemological radicalism. All the two camps could agree on was that the Americans were hopelessly wrong in ...”

“... When James Ellroy’s latest cod-cosmic rehash of his troubled – and troubling – life arrived on my doorstep I assumed the business of reacquainting myself with the terrain shouldn’t be that difficult. The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women is, on the face of it, a substantiation of Ellroy’s previous memoir, My Dark Places, in which he employed the true-crime plot device of hiring his own homicide detective, formerly of the LA sheriff’s department, in order to reopen the investigation into the unsolved murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker, in 1958 ...”

“... the mercantile air’. Here Sandage becomes a master sleuth. For example, he introduces us to Dr William Henry Brisbane, who enters the Mercantile Agency’s books in 1844 as a go-ahead fellow with $22,000 and 100 acres of land. Two years later, a second entry dramatically revises the bottom line. Brisbane, it turned out, had inherited $100,000 and quickly ...”

“... are, how limited agency often is, how contingent, opportunistic and unpredictable change can be. William Morris’s words might resonate with Bevins’s Brazilian protesters: ‘Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to ...”

“... ingenuity to convey it. But the restless contemporaneity of her vision makes a stark contrast with William Cooper’s impeccable Scenes from Metropolitan Life, written in the 1950s but held back from publication up to the present day for legal reasons. Cooper’s work, falling between the celebrated Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Married ...”

“... exchanged with the gentlemen. After that a riot broke out, the guards had to be called from St James’s to restore order and the night ended with a £100 bill for damages and a great deal of heated comment in the papers. According to one of the supper party, Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex, who sent an excited account of the events to his friend ...”

“... Library as Additional MSS 60168-60256, thanks to the good offices of Noakes’s widow, Thompson, William Lamont and others. What to do with this equivalent, for the archaeology of sectarian nonconformity, of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun? There followed from the appropriation of the Muggletonian archive a practical exploration of a ...”

“... They are good for the best and least complicated of reasons: the author can write. Wherever Gunner James Witte turns his eye he finds something interesting, needing studying, and he interests us in it too – amazingly. First, it is how, as a Territorial, to pose as a dashing royal Horse Artillery man. There was a tailor in the village where we were billeted ...”

“... friend over a long period. Like Cotton, Jonson was a pupil at Westminster of the great historian William Camden, with whom Cotton formed perhaps the most important friendship of his life. Any age can mock the values of another. Cotton’s antiquarianism is at times a tempting target. Member of Parliament for the archetypal rotten borough of Old ...”

“... between them these two engaging old monstres profanes have produced a book as entertaining as a James Bond novel with the same pace, excitement and high standard of consumer durables, feminine splendour and male chauvinist piggery. The Baron broke all the rules of seduction, he says, with ‘two exceptions. I never deflower and I do not persist if the lady ...”

“... coexist with separate Scottish imperial aspirations, and would continue to do so until the 1690s. James VI of Scotland, who went on to become James I of the Three Kingdoms, was as determined to impose Lowlands ‘civilitie’ on his ‘barbarous’ Gaelic Islands, by the sword if need be, as the English were to plant their ...”

“... held in higher esteem than ‘rhabarbarum’, which was believed to grow somewhere beyond Barbary (William Turner in the 16th century thought the ultimate source was Ethiopia). But neither of those commanded anything like the prestige or the prices of what was popularly known as ‘Chinese’ rhubarb – though whether it actually came from China was very far ...”

“... summary would go something like this. Towards the end of the 18th century, the Scottish genius James Hutton recognised that the Earth was of enormous antiquity, or, as he put it, showed ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’; furthermore, he correctly inferred the igneous origin of many rocks, unlike the Wernerians, who thought that these ...”

“... a table convivially cluttered with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed ...”

“... 17th centuries, alongside which later Viennese classicism appeared a bland retreat. When you hear William Byrd and Thomas Tallis for the first time, you don’t know where things are going; there are weird harmonies and tonal shifts, curious crooked cadences that loom suddenly from unlit verges. And such dissonances! In the cathedral, we loved to squeeze out ...”