“... was lucky to have Robert, but then Charlotte Brontë was perhaps equally lucky to have had Arthur Nicholls. Had Charlotte lived, she might have continued to write good things as private woman and happy spouse, blissfully submitting her letters and manuscripts to her husband’s censorship. Elizabeth was also, in a sense, a conscious and loving ...”

“... in their allegiances than most of us? It seems impossible even to guess intelligently but there is little evidence that they were. It is the twenty-odd years before the First World War that most catch the eye. This was when the Apostles were something like a recruiting agency for what we loosely call Bloomsbury, but what we ought perhaps to acknowledge as a ...”

“... that Béraud was genuine. Not long afterwards, Marthe Béraud confessed to trickery. She had little option: a newspaper had found the servant who’d played the spirit she summoned – that of Bien Boa, a courtly and richly moustachioed 16th-century Brahmin. Not for the first time, Richet refused to admit that what he had witnessed was a trick, and the ...”

“... foreword, intro and preface as if I hadn’t made them yet. Gautier’s extended polemic has very little to do with the novel itself. It was, in fact, written to lengthen the total text so that it might be issued in two volumes, and would have been better called a fusillade. His attack on the utilitarian character of the bourgeoisie came to be regarded, after ...”

“... department where he was employed, and a few other things. There is no new philosophy here, and little news about the opinions, or even the development of ideas, of either author. It is symptomatic that the editor begins the book with an imaginary dialogue of his own composition, in which the protagonists are named ‘Lakatos’ and ‘Feyerabend’. It is ...”

“... early reviews must have made depressing reading for a beleaguered poet. Everybody remembers that Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could ...”

“... written about so often by Vidal’s guests and interviewers, and by Vidal himself, that there is little to say that hasn’t been said. It is a beautiful place, if you like houses perched on cliffs, with an epic view of the Tyrrhenian Sea (somewhere in the hazy distance south of Salerno are the remains of the Greek settlement at Paestum). If you don’t like ...”

“... In The Crisis of 1614, essays by Jonathan Gibson and Stephen Clucas show Ralegh’s cousin Sir Arthur Gorges adapting Lucan’s verse history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was among the most learned historians of his time. Yet his account ...”

“... picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James William Doyle, an uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle – was known as a meticulous historian, and the figures are vividly and accurately presented, using known 18th-century likenesses. Dr Johnson is holding forth, with the professional eavesdropper Boswell at his shoulder; Sir Joshua has his ear ...”

“... tendency ever (foreseeably) to die down. In Britain Thatcher tries to curry favour with voters by Little Englander sniping at European union – which nevertheless moves nearer and nearer in basic economic arrangements. In other countries nationalism is more likely to erupt in terrible extremes of desperation and damage as car bombs destroy the remnants of ...”

“... by applauding the victory or blessing the cause of their own state. Thus English historians saw little to question in the plundering raids of Henry V or even of William the Conqueror. French historians saw little to question in the Empire of Napoleon. The jus ad bellum has proved a will o’ the wisp, though still ...”

“... of Verses’, which he presented to her on her 22nd birthday in 1908, and ‘The Little June Book’, given the following year. ‘It would only be proper,’ he wrote, ‘for you to have your own private book of verses, even if it were very small and if the verses were very bad.’ Although certain lines and images from both are carried over ...”

“... of the Temple when the Terror was at its height, without experiencing certain qualms.’ Baron Arthur Léon Imbert de Saint Amand began his late 19th-century biography of Marie-Thérèse from a place of desolation. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Madame Royale, later Duchesse d’Angoulême was the first child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the sister ...”

“... who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!’ is the way he described his spectral existence in his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The dynamism which was transforming the geography of early 20th-century urban America was also changing the interior landscape of its ...”

“... just merits the attention of a critical-biographer – as well write a book on Walter Legge or Arthur Gelb. Since the Lamberts as a dynasty do not have the special cultural force of the Bloomsbury Group, the Vorticists or even the Auden Group, we are left with the supposition that the biography’s publishers, who already include Constant’s Music Ho! and ...”