“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... continued to his death, can be tested when compared with its lack in his nearest English rival, William Walton, born 11 years before him. Walton’s career began in brilliance and ended in conformity. Britten told Walton that hearing the latter’s Viola Concerto, in 1931, was a turning point in his musical life. In the late 1920s, Walton was the great hope ...”

“... didn’t deter Teruzzi from making an impulsive visit to Varese, where Lilliana was rehearsing for William Tell, and proposing to her. She rebuffed him: ‘Please, I think of you as a friend.’ He left, furious.It would be nice to imagine that this cultured American had woken up to the unpleasantness of her suitor’s politics, but that wasn’t, alas, the ...”

“... clear how the figure was powered, but according to an account by the 16th-century antiquarian William Lambarde it was able to ‘bow down and lifte up it selfe, to shake and stirre the handes and feete, to nod the head, to rolle the eies, to wag the chaps, to bende the browes’.How did medieval and early modern audiences perceive such creations? Todd and ...”

“... questions. The tale of Hylas, for instance, is one of the better-known episodes, thanks to John William Waterhouse’s painting with its loved-up, spaced-out nymphs. Casually, Apollonius drops a bombshell: Hercules had adopted the boy, he says, after killing his father. He alludes to some dispute over an ox, but has no time to explain: ‘these tales would ...”

“... and yet remained faithful to those consciences. I have been claiming that figures like Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Proust and Wittgenstein illustrate what I called ‘freedom as the recognition of contingency’. Such freedom, I would now claim, is integral to the idea of a liberal society. In order to show how the charge of relativism looks against ...”

“... 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 ...”