“... water. The first issue of the Strand Magazine was published in 1891, with a cover illustration by George Haité. The letters of the title are strung across the street like bunting, while the view looks east, showing the spires of two churches (St Mary-le-Strand and St Clement Danes) and the neo-gothic spire of the Royal Courts of Justice. In 1901, readers ...”

“... of the best sources for Bacon’s thinking in these years is the diary of his cousin Diana Watson, who saw him regularly in London. ‘At tea,’ she wrote, Bacon ‘said he could not get away from the Crucifixion idea – that he never really wanted to do anything else’. She referred to it as his ‘frightful Crucifixion complex’. His only ...”

“... names in the frame include Alan Beith, Vince Cable, Frank Field, Alan Haselhurst, Ann Widdecombe, George Young and, most remarkable of all, John Bercow, who many on our side favour as a way of getting back at the Tories. I should also report that one other wildly improbable name has been mentioned: moi. ‘Mr Speaker Mullin,’ Nick Robinson called as I was ...”

“... the reader wants it to be), and that the falling cherry is Grace descending. He had, I expect, George Barker’s True Confession in mind: Let Grace, like lace, descend upon me And dignify my wingless shoulder ... Come to me, Grace, and I will take You close into my wicked hands, And when you come, make no mistake, I’ll disgrace you at both ends. ‘The ...”

“... her for money and influence, and to have gone in fear of her female will. According to J. Steven Watson’s Preface – one of two excellent introductory pieces, the other being by the editor of the volume – Townshend’s customs duties led to the loss of America, and his death in 1767 concluded a train of dazzling Parliamentary feats and turns. ‘Those ...”

“... Norwood was charting the decline and fall of Carlyle’s reputation, an American enthusiast, Isaac Watson Dyer, was completing his comprehensive Bibliography of Thomas Carlyle’s Writings. The multi-volume Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Collected Letters owes a great deal to the American Carlyle scholar and founding editor C.R. Sanders. The new Strouse Carlyle ...”

“... 1929 the Dial ceased publication. Of the two owners, one was mad and the other, James Sibley Watson, a rich philanthropist, had new interests. Marianne, who wasn’t pleased, chose to describe the decision as ‘largely chivalry’ on their part: ‘I didn’t have time for work of my own,’ she told ...”

“... has a very grand tradition in England, and though the subject failed to catch the attention of George Orwell, it might have been a nice thing if it had, given its place in England’s emotional life at every level and in every class. Orwell was an old Etonian, so he knew all about that, but he also spent a certain amount of time in the vicinity of Wigan ...”

“... speech ‘about the Labour Party being hopeless, dominated by four trade-union leaders, etc’. As George Brown, full of wine and faith in the T& G, claimed in 1955: ‘It’s our Party, not yours.’ Crossman had recently been apprised of the inwardness of this situation when receiving unwonted support from Fred Lee. ‘If the T & G think they’re going to ...”

“... hydrofoil to Macao in order to see the temples and the villas and the colonial cafés which Tony Watson-Gandy must have seen when he lived there, just after the war, with a Chinese boyfriend and pipes of opium, studying Mandarin. A sudden rush of identification led me, for the length of an afternoon and for the only time in my life, to think boys as ...”

“... volume in this regard with the two older Oxford histories it partially replaces: J. Steven Watson’s The Reign of George III 1760-1815 (1960) and Llewellyn Woodward’s The Age of Reform 1815-70 (1938). Watson devoted two chapters to Britain’s war with its American ...”

“... that has taken its poorer cousin in out of charity ... As for literature after reunification, George Steiner thought there could be none anyway after Hitler; but he had in mind the bureaucratic degeneration of the language. The question reactivates the matter of tradition, and of the framework in which the new text – any new text – is to be received ...”

“... lesson. This time he trusted an even more egregious spy, a plaster-modeller going by the name of George Edwards. After their first meeting, Edwards told his friends: ‘Thistlewood is the boy for us, he’s the one who will do our work.’ From that moment, everything Thistlewood did and said was immediately passed on to Bow Street and the Home Office.In ...”

“... residents, and one of the first to appear at the new court was a local apothecary’s wife, Grace Watson, charged with ‘giving reviling speeches against Sir Baptist Hicks touching the building of the Sessions House’. A later writer describes it as ‘a shapeless brick lump containing a great warehouse in the centre for the court, and houses for the ...”

“... and also because some of its readings are a bit dubious. The Elizabethan translator Thomas Watson takes him to task for this, noting rather sniffily that his own translation of the poem ‘varieth from that sense which Chaucer useth … which he doth upon no other warrant than his own simple private opinion’. This sort of editorial quibbling, not to ...”