“... particularly telling Romantic variant on The Recess, the anonymous novelette published in 1820 as Rose Douglas, or, The Court of Elizabeth, An Interesting Historical Tale, Detailing the Life and Singular Adventures of Rose Douglas, the lovely daughter of Mary Queen of Scots: Her Interview with Queen Elizabeth, and residence ...”

“... Paul Ferdonnet and André Olbrecht, who recorded programmes in Stuttgart; in the States, ‘Tokyo Rose’, Mildred Gillars (‘Axis Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most ...”

“... Hujar just photographed the fabric), his portrait sitters can resemble figures by Nadar or Julia Margaret Cameron. Some of them were famous – William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, John Giorno – or soon to be: Hujar recorded successive generations of downtown scenesters, including Gary Indiana, Fran Lebowitz and Cookie Mueller. Even if he had been only a ...”

“... of the great world religions, the mindless chauvinism of Ronald Reagan, the obdurate monetarism of Margaret Thatcher, and the empty sloganising and football-fan mentality of British politics in general. Reading Militant, one is less struck by the advocacy of extra-constitutional courses which so exercises Michael Foot than by the ritual incantation of ...”

“... Gladstone called it), and some in Gordon Haight’s magisterial work as editor and biographer. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston have now provided a very welcome and complete edition of all the diaries and journals, covering the years between Eliot’s union with Lewes in 1854, when she was 35, and her death in 1880. Only around a quarter of this text ...”

“... brought the mills of Lancashire to a halt for the best part of two years. As monumental New Delhi rose in Lutyens’s imperial splendour, Anglo-Indians anxiously decamped to the suburbs of London. The fate of the Empire mirrored the fate of the treaties. Despite the impressive appearance of permanence, every one of the major buttresses of that high-vaulted ...”

“... dissuaded only by the advice of their friend Mazzini. Where Kaplan is content to describe, Phyllis Rose explains. In her Parallel Lives, she uses the Carlyles’ marriage as a framing device to enclose case-histories of four other Victorian marriages (or, strictly speaking, three: for better or worse, the Dickenses, Ruskins and John Stuart Mills were united in ...”

“... Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have been published and admired here; but, of her nine works of fiction, only The Bear Boy – published in America as Heir to the ...”

“... I’m sometimes told that the Scots don’t like Thatcherism,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Scottish Conservative Conference in 1988. ‘Well, I find that hard to believe – because the Scots invented Thatcherism, long before I was thought of.’ The Scot she meant was Adam Smith, a figure popularly identified as the founder of economics, an apostle of capitalism and honoured prophet of the new right ...”

“... from the heroine of Ménie Muriel Dowie’s A Girl in the Karpathians (1891) to Hester Cawthorn in Rose Allatini’s Despised and Rejected (1917) and Edith Haynes in Cicely Hamilton’s William – An Englishman (1919). The wearing of English tailor-made does not immediately identify these women as ‘mannish lesbians’; it does not, that is, invoke the ...”

“... Normans and the absolutism of the Stuarts, in the Victorian era the Saxon witenagemot mystically rose again in the form of city council chambers. Civic self-government became a symbol of British identity. ‘On the other side of the Channel, Paris is France, but no such rule applies with us,’ the Birmingham Daily Press ...”

“... celebrations. The contribution of my former department to the general gaiety was to be a talk by Margaret Drabble, on the topic of young women at university in the 1960s and 1970s. I was dun gone, as we say in the trade, pensioned off, but reeled in for a last duty. ‘Or as warm-up woman,’ I said in the same breath as ‘I’d be delighted. I’ve read ...”

“... his Irenicum, which attacked Nonconformism as entirely without justification. As Stillingfleet rose through the established Church eventually to become Bishop of Worcester, Mortlock rose with him to become Master of the Stationers’ Company. In the same year that he published Order and Disorder, Mortlock published a ...”

“... Post’, a cross between ‘Queen Elizabeth’ and ‘Wendy Cussons’, from the National Rose Society’s Annual) and of rather dull canapés (from Good Housekeeping Colour Cookery of 1967). Nothing, it seemed, was so distant, hidden or commonplace that its appearance would be unrecorded for long. Bert Hardy, who was present at the D-Day landings and ...”

“... practise, practise,’ Dad said. Grandma raised her grey head and called out immediately. ‘Margaret, Margaret, he’s doing it again!’ ‘Leave it, grandma,’ I said. ‘Please.’ What are you, a policeman?’ she said. She called out once more. ‘Margaret! Just when we’re ...”