“... that court life belongs to the realm of serious play (a theme studied to splendid effect by Thomas Greene). The world of the court is rich, splendid, noble; but it is also a hortus conclusus, confining its inhabitants to a narrow space. Early illustrations show the participants in these discussions stiffly lined up in a room of no great size. Court ...”

“... are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna Karenina and tremble at ...”

“... passengers, who included the American tycoon Alfred Vanderbilt and the Welsh mining magnate D.A. Thomas. The German submarine U-20 had already torpedoed three British cargo vessels off the Irish coast. At lunchtime on 7 May its captain, Walther Schwieger, sighted a four-stack passenger liner, clearly British, and dived to intercept her. He fired a single ...”

“... couplets was an achievement unattempted by anyone before and unachieved by anyone since, including Thomas Creech in 1682. Lucy’s first children, twin sons, were born in 1639; she was last pregnant in 1662, so her children may have frequented the schoolroom for rather more than twenty years; her translation of Lucretius could have taken her as long. Though ...”

“... dropped. The manual purports to have been written by the problem letter itself, alias the ‘Hon. Henry H.’ – though putting an unaspirated ‘Hon.’ in front of the name is hardly playing fair with uncertain readers, who might be tempted to aspirate it out of the deference accorded to rank. Having worked her way along the self-help shelf, Mugglestone ...”

“... always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and ...”

“... narrative. She summons back into the annals of the wars the ‘taciturn’ figures the composer Thomas Haswell remembered on the Tyneside of his youth: ‘the sea-dogs of Camperdown, of the Nile, of Trafalgar … in every state of picturesque dismemberment – one arm, one leg, one arm and one leg, or a mere trunk with neither arms nor legs’. Uglow ...”

“... female husbands varied with the state of their relationships. Some wives pressed charges. In 1838, Henry Stoake, an oven builder from Manchester who had lived as a man since his late teens, was exposed by his wife of 22 years. Angry that he was holding back her housekeeping allowance, she sought a legal separation and tried to secure a claim to his assets by ...”

“... capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed Smith, Elder in 1917; between the wars, according to Ian Norrie, Hutchinson ‘absorbed so many imprints that no complete record of them ...”

“... and pays off well: it makes a first-rate anthology. There are a number of poems, by Suckling, Henry King, George Farewell, Andrew Young, which will probably be new to the reader, and which will certainly produce ‘the illusion that it was written specially for me’. There are well-known favourites too, like Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’ and Flecker’s ...”

“... Frye’s Fearful Symmetry is a far better introduction than a book like King’s (‘Blake charged Thomas Butts’s son £26 5s Od per annum for engraving lessons’). Now that Frye is dead, Blake’s best living critic is Harold Bloom. If Blake’s mental forms had a life before 1757, they also had one after 1827. Arthur Symons saw this: he was interested not ...”

“... Church, but the claim would be more persuasive did not the teaching vary so greatly. The Gospel of Thomas, probably composed about the middle of the century, consists of short sayings and parables of Jesus, some of them derived from, or at any rate parallel to, those known from the New Testament, others hitherto unknown and including a few which may well be ...”

“... one still has to fight for the phallic reality ... So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ... It rather looks as if Witter Bynner was a good influence on Lawrence, as well as being a severe and witty critic. But then, to judge by these letters, he was a pretty good fellow all round. He seems to have fancied himself as a sort of ...”

“... in less workaday genres. So she has Lizzy dealing with Mrs Reynolds, who helps her keep house, Thomas Bidwell, who polishes her candlesticks, and Mrs Donovan, who looks after her children. And she has Lizzy worrying about Napoleon, remedying a lack of interest in the world that modern critics have thought disappointing or at least odd (though this was ...”

“... more consideration here than do some of the run of the mill Authorised Version spin-offs, such as Thomas Macklin’s six-volume Bible published in 1800. Macklin’s doorstopper included 71 prints engraved from Biblical pictures by contemporary artists such as Joshua Reynolds, and so offers more to the aesthetic bibliophile than those versions that people ...”