“... out to include tags such as hinc illae lachrymae. Such items of internal evidence are worth very little, as Furbank and Owens contend: but not all ‘phrases and stylistic tricks’ fall into the same category. The author of the 1715 pamphlet uses the phrase ‘Quondam Chancellor’ of exactly the same figure as does Oldmixon in pamphlets of the same ...”

“... falling far short of the standard set for the series by Renée Winegarten’s excellent little book on Madame de Stael. In so short a text, Gertrude’s involvement with the anti-suffragists hardly deserves a chapter to itself, while the intricacies of Mesopotamian politics, which she helped unravel, require more careful treatment.Nevertheless Ms ...”

“... in England in the year of the Irish rebellion, as courier to the ‘Jacobin’ underground. With Arthur O’Connor and others, he was arrested when about to board ship for France, and a sensationally seditious address was found in his pocket, welcoming a French invasion in support of British liberty. It led to a dramatic ‘state trial’ and there was much ...”

“... was surrounded, clubbed, impaled with lances, shot with arrows, then scalped. Rachel took her little boy James and began to run, but, as she wrote after her release, ‘a large sulky looking Indian picked up a hoe and knocked me down.’ Silas Parker went for his bag of shot and was soon killed, as were the other men who remained in the fort trying to ...”

“... all just ‘crackpot stuff’.After the trouble with the memoir, I tried to bring her out of it a little, and threw a dinner for her at the Café Loup on 13th Street. She was in one of her moods when she arrived and told me I was shallow for having asked so many intellectuals and snobs who didn’t talk the way she talked or see the world ‘plainly’. For ...”

“... strong for disliking the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and ...”

“... political activities from the rest of his life is useful, though it is peculiar to hear so little of his other commitments. The Furbank and Owens narrative is certainly counter-literary. It ends in 1720, when Defoe, according to them, ‘turned his back on politics’. Robinson Crusoe apart, his novels are still to come. Richetti has some of the same ...”

“... soon as a decade became a label, there were people who did not wish to have it stuck to them – Arthur Machen, the magus of the fantastic, although a paid-up member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, insisted to the end of his days that he was ‘no part of the 90s’. Others welcomed the affiliation. The 1930s poets owed their instant celebrity to their ...”

“... Tale of the Heike, newly translated by Royall Tyler. Tyler is the most prominent translator since Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker to take on the Sisyphean task of rendering Japan’s vast classical literature into accessible English. The Tale of the Heike is an especially challenging work for Western audiences. The Tale of Genji, with its eerily ...”

“... socialist romantic William Morris, implying – mistakenly – that the unideological Attlee had little idea about Morris or his idyll of agrarian Englishness. Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) – also a utopian fiction – was written as a riposte to Bellamy’s Looking Backward. The pragmatic Attlee knew which vision seemed more ...”

“... of 1934.’ There are ‘gats’ and ‘rods’; Anna (aka ‘toots’) has seen Public Enemy, Little Caesar, Scarface and Citizen Kane; The Glass Key is in cinemas; there’s talk of Gary Cooper, Veronica Lake, Joan Fontaine. There are egg creams, charlottes russes and clams casino. Agnes and Eddie’s sister Brianne once danced in the Follies, and Agnes ...”

“... of British history set up by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century. Was there really no King Arthur, and no King Lear either? Milton clearly did not want to believe it, arguing patriotically if defensively: ‘those old and inborn names of successive Kings, never any to have bin real persons, or done in thir lives at least some part of what so long hath ...”

“... in his prime and the myth was developed and embellished in the books of former lieutenants like Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen. It has only really been in the past decade that the revisionists have gained the upper hand and Kennedy’s record has been compared unfavourably with those of his two predecessors, Truman and Eisenhower. Even his two ...”

“... to have an abiding affection. The Standard then was no mere rag: Foot was to recruit Jon Kimche, Arthur Koestler and Isaac Deutscher to write for it, and it provided Foot with a secure and happy base. Over the years Beaverbrook showered him with gifts, right-wing opinions, money, and a friendship which, given their opposed views, did both men credit. But ...”

“... the differences in attitude and status between share fishermen and those working for wages, but little about the daily struggle with the sea. The narrow focus leads these writers to omit consideration of the major villainy in the history of the activity: the systematic over-fishing of our waters by more and more powerful harvesting techniques. There was ...”