“... and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!’ So William Cobbett wrote to Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1816. He did not exaggerate. The verb ‘foment’ might have been invented to describe the activities of Lords Sidmouth and Castlereagh and their spymasters in Bow Street during the turbulent 1810s. Seldom in ...”

“... Pennsylvania, in 1905. When in her second year she developed a crush on her fellow student Peggy James, Mary ‘courted’ her too (‘courted’ is Leavell’s word): William James’s daughter was very much ‘our kind’, and since Mary expected her family to live together always, she could only assume that Peggy ...”

“... to Lord Byron’, but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice’s ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, the famously camp prose-piece ‘Hetty to Nancy’, and the joint-authored ‘Last Will and Testament’. According to Auden, MacNeice wrote about eighty of the 240 pages (the review in ...”

“... in his head, which he feared might in time prove an apoplexy; as in fine it did and killed him’. William Cowper congratulated a friend on contracting the disorder, ‘because it seems to promise us that we shall keep you long’. Hester Piozzi’s husband grew worried and alarmed if his gout did not return regularly. Besides, gout was very much a mark of ...”

“... done for other projected and equally unauthorised lives of Hammett by David Fechheimer and William Godschalk, and upon material gathered by William Nolan, editor of Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. In other words, Shadow Man emerges from a background of intrigue: prolonged scuffling in the literary undergrowth and a ...”

“... maps, full of trends and lines of force but most of the actual place-names missed out. I remember William Empson devising an Outline of Outlines, reduced in the end to a single sentence: ‘Everything is pretty all right because of science.’ Where are they now? Sunk back into the vast ocean of superannuated enlightenment. If we are to find the origins of ...”

“... an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both Henry James and T.S. Eliot used the deadly word ‘provincial’. Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with ...”

“... and Hawksmoor’. Invoking those artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and ...”

“... a more mixed bunch, admittedly, but still mostly distinguished and competent. That the names of William Hague at the age of 36 and Iain Duncan Smith at any age should now be added to that illustrious roll is bizarre. How did this Conservative descent into absurdity occur? During Major’s premiership by far the greatest cause of dissension in the governing ...”

“... anxieties of growers and the anger of workers would become irrelevant. In 1897, forty years after William Perkin stumbled on the first synthetic aniline dye – mauve – researchers at BASF finally synthesised indigo. The work had taken years and cost eighteen million gold marks – more than the capital value of the company. Experiments in organic chemistry ...”

“... McQuillan, Winston McCaughey, Ritchie Latimer, Albert Beacom, Robert Bennett, Thomas Loughran and James McFall were with their children when they were attacked. William Gordon’s 10-year-old-daughter, Lesley, and seven-year-old son, Richard, were beside him in the family car when an IRA booby-trap bomb exploded. He and ...”

“... and false imprisonment. The government’s attempt to challenge an award of £300 to the printer William Huckle gave the Court of Common Pleas an opportunity to point out that treating him ‘very civilly’, with ‘beefsteaks and beer’, had not diminished the gravity of the state’s ‘exercising arbitrary power, violating Magna Carta, and attempting to ...”

“... and your sister.’ Stuck in this enforced, accompanied solitude, Wordsworth turned to writing. ‘William works hard,’ Dorothy reported, ‘but not very much in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making ...”

“... ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all. Kafka When H.G. Wells accused Henry James of having sacrificed his life to art James replied, with characteristically artful indignation: ‘I live, live intensely, and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it might be, is in my own kind of expression of ...”

“... death is fleeing the frame on the right. There are no such illusions – another surprise – in James Tissot’s small, brutal watercolour of an event he witnessed on 29 May 1871. It shows a high wall, part of the fortifications in the Bois de Boulogne, and a man in the uniform of the National Guard plummeting backwards through the air, jacket ...”