“... conviction seven years later in a bitter review published in the Pall Mall Gazette. Discussing J.A. Froude’s novel, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: An Irish Romance of the Last Century, Wilde attacks Froude’s patronising ignorance and then states: ‘If in the last century she [England] tried to govern Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race ...”

“... to be mad? Or that the bibliographer’s field has been as ravaged by fearful elements as King Lear’s heath? Perhaps, more romantically, Mr Laurence pictures himself as Browning’s supernatural knight, anxious and enigmatic, whose savage trample to the dark tower over the bones of his predecessors contained qualities both of triumph and ...”

“... separated, at birth, who goes on to discover that he is his own non-existent, royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge supported by the likelihood that ...”

“... of radical Jews and well-heeled liberal Wasps, the New York establishment. John Hammond Jr (1910-87), to whom Stowe (rightly) devotes more space than to anyone else with the exception of Ellington, typified this combination. A Vanderbilt, Hammond was an almost absurdly typical Ivy League product and (in his last years) a devoted member of the ...”

“... 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 plainly ‘not been crippled in the usual manner’: this was in the north of the country) that he could ...”

“... and that Scott was ‘a tame and feeble writer’. Unluckily, in the same article, an Irish MP – Richard Martin – was twitted as a ‘jackass’: he wrote instantly to William Blackwood, threatening legal action and demanding that the article’s author be unmasked. A distraught Wilson took to his bed and snivelled to Blackwood: ‘To own that article is ...”

“... how artificial a construct it is, it has warning bells built in. The central characters are called Richard and Karen; Karen is very, very thin; she takes one diet pill too many and is visited by aliens. And so on. Names, chapter-titles, bits of dialogue and even the central plot concept in this most crashingly earnest of novels are also the most frivolous of ...”

“... used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many readers accepted would do for the time being. In what my headmaster used to call the interim period, self-help books have taken over the world, which is fast becoming a place where no one is safe from the threat of their own ...”

“... got the knife. (Snodgrass) The unlikely Monk of Montaudon, who was ostensibly commanded by his king ‘to eat meat, court women, sing and write poetry’, composed this delightfully unmonastic verse: I love it when, in t he summer season, I rest down where the water burbles – The meadow’s green, the flowers pleasing, The sweet birds practising their ...”

“... transparency; but he was also quick to see how cults of mystery were exploited by both priest and king to legitimate their power. There is no reason to assume that artists have been immune to this vice. The fact is that there is also something elusive and opaque about fine cooking or magnificent tennis-playing. Heston Blumenthal probably has no more idea of ...”

“... rest of it is a film set, cranking out heritage for export: crinoline frolics and The Madness of King George. I’d barely set foot outside my first secondhand bookshop when I was pounced on by a two-person television crew doing a vox pop on the Dome. There was a man hefting a DVC camera and a woman with a clipboard. After a morning trying to tease a story ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... The antipathy to Burke has cropped up not just among those like Berlin and Hampshire and J.H. Plumb, who believe that he had the wrong ideas, but also among historians of the Namier school, especially Lewis Namier himself, who believe that ideas don’t matter much in politics and that Burke was dishonest in pretending they did when in reality he was ...”

“... later Elizabethan churchmen had viewed the Presbyterian threat and the prospect of a Scottish king as head of the Church of England, but there was less need for nerves after 1604, when the esteem of bishops seems to have risen among the laity. The troubled Parliaments of the 1620s produced no challenge to the episcopal office. If the term ...”

“... writes – might look apolitical, but when push came to shove in 1642 such persons inclined to the king. During the Civil War Browne was a visible Royalist sympathiser in pro-Parliamentary Norwich. The first readers of Religio Medici could hear its title as an oxymoron: doctors were not supposed to be good Christians. This notion had various causes: the pagan ...”