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“... Davies? Oh, he was a sort of natural, wasn’t he – like Clare?’ James Reeves’s Introduction to his Penguin anthology of Georgian poetry puts this absentminded question into the mouth of an unidentified intellectual of recent times. It refers to the author of the present book, who is also the author of the once-famous Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and of some six hundred poems ...”

“... tale not the teller? But, more important, the ‘subtle unsoundness’ which Marlow detected in Lord Jim is not only a part of Conrad himself but an essential part of the way literature and duality work together. Never mind about the ship at the end, and the way the captain, to do service to his double, risks his first command: what matters to Conrad and to ...”

“... bourgeois, a Wilcox rather than a Schlegel or even a Leonard Bast. Or so it can easily seem. James Gindin, however, seeing the case in quite another light, challengingly subtitles his biography ‘An Alien’s Fortress’ and suggests at the outset that, despite appearances, Galsworthy had his full share of the discontent and the divided mind needed to ...”

“... and colonic irrigation. And she gives cameo parts to the royal entourage and its hangers-on: Lord Snowdon, Raine Spencer, Major Ronald Ferguson, Koo Stark, James Hewitt, Madam Vasso and the rest. Thus described by Kelley, the House of Windsor is part Evelyn Waugh, part Tom Sharpe, wholly Spitting Image. It is not so ...”

“... quite the same. Alongside the major literary names there were numerous minor ones, Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer Thomas Sackville (Norton’s fellow author of Gorboduc and a contributor to The Mirror for Magistrates) at their head. Countless Elizabethan and 17th-century MPs wrote poems or plays, John Lyly and Marvell among them. Literature was a binding force ...”

“... Today’s tabloids are particularly vicious. Not for them magnanimity in victory. ‘Arise Lord Gorbals’, the front page of the Mail sneers over a story focusing on the size of the Speaker’s pension. 21 May. Sure enough, having disposed of the Speaker, the Tory media have launched a campaign for a snap election – exactly as Frank Dobson ...”

“... why is it so unclear whether Gertrude is guilty or innocent? His answer is historical: Hamlet is James I, his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, whose husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered eight months after James’s birth in 1566. Three months after Henry’s death she married the man ...”

“... while employed as tutor to Louis XIV’s heir. Interest in world history is nothing new. When Lord Acton planned the volumes of the Cambridge Modern History in the 1890s, he took for granted both the need for ‘transcending nationality’, and that world history signified something more than ‘the combined history of all countries’. As to ‘global ...”

“... while a quietly seething poisoner would look dreary and unstylishly old hat. In this book, James Whorton makes it clear that dealing death by poison was not, after all, exclusively suburban, although, apart from later industrial disasters, it does seem to have been almost entirely domesticated. The poison in Whorton’s book is specifically ...”

“... of Curll’s output since such early publications as The Case of Sodomy, in the Tryal of Mervin Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven and The Case of John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford in Ireland; who was Convicted of the Sin of Uncleanness with a Cow, and other Creatures (both 1710); Fielding also misses the transparent pose of righteous indignation that Curll ...”

“... sense of loss. For her the ancien régime never quite lost its glamour; she dearly loved a lord and her literary heroes were the Great Victorians. The power of the past, as childhood or simply nostalgia, was a recurring theme in her work, at odds with the modernity of her material; just as her sensitivity to women and her obsessive interest in female ...”

“... affairs was becoming both difficult and costly. Churchill, who left the War Ministry and succeeded Lord Milner as Colonial Secretary, had devised a cheaper strategy that he now imposed, using bombers and armoured cars without ‘eating up troops and money’. The air squadrons in Iraq launched one of history’s first full-scale aerial bombardments of a ...”

“... batch of letters she had saved from the flames to her grand-niece, Lady Knatchbull, whose son, Lord Brabourne, had them published – like precious relics – in 1884. A number of other letters have surfaced since then; the great Austen scholar, R.W. Chapman, issued the first modern edition of the correspondence in 1932. Still, only 161 Austen letters are ...”

“... favourite word hung in the aftermath. ‘Obviously’. The obvious and the hidden. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts. ‘Am I hidden, and my parents obvious?’ I thought. Yet what was obvious to me seemed opaque to them – my lack of religious faith, my ‘philosophising’, my attention to the pain and suffering of things . . . And here I ...”

“... at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan said: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 10. An experienced cabinet minister said in an interview: ‘I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’ Here are some of ...”