“... England? No!’) Despite this, cannabis had a fearsome reputation, equal to that of opium. William Caine, an 1890s abolitionist MP quoted by James Mills, claimed it was the ‘most horrible intoxicant the world has yet produced’. In 1924, the Egyptian statesman Mohamed El Guindy called it ‘a terrible menace to the whole world’. A moral panic in ...”

“... given for the change was not unreasonable. If preachers persisted in their radical views, the masters would not allow them to minister to the slaves. A sense of guilt must nevertheless have been planted. The religion of the gentry, as Lewis describes it, was not just one of ‘feeling’ but of the most appalling sentimentality. In this these Virginians ...”

“... fighting than the notorious school of forty years earlier. The cleverest boys, not to mention the masters, saw through him as a shallow, ignorant, literal-minded man, who (as Tyerman puts it) ‘compensated for his small mind with expansive care for his pupils’. Vaughan is not the only victim of Tyerman’s unsentimental look at the careers of 28 Harrow ...”

“... give up their birthright of liberty and subject themselves to the domination of lords and masters. This is also one of his basic preoccupations in The Ready and Easy Way, in which he contrasts the tyranny of Charles I, under whom everyone forfeited their liberty, with the rule of Parliament, which acknowledged ‘the people of England to be a free ...”

“... of the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov is a worthy member of the distinguished Modern Masters series, which includes excellent semi-technical short books on, among others, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Russell, Freud, Piaget and Chomsky. The author, who lectures in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oxford, writes from first-hand expert ...”

“... Bellow replied that his study had been English literature. He was asked to give his opinion of William Wordsworth as a poet. He responded that he had always thought of William Wordsworth as one of the Romantics. ‘There is no place for you,’ said Chambers on hearing this, ‘in this organisation.’ The future Nobel ...”

“... they combined painting with the far more profitable activity of dealing in antiquities and Old Masters. From the mid-18th century they formed a small, exclusive colony financed by their compatriots, for whom they often acted as bankers and agents as well, employing Italian artists as restorers and fakers. The number of British travellers and residents in ...”

“... and accusations of the Revolutionary era to enjoy direct Hanoverian patronage from its Grand Masters, the Duke of Cumberland, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex. Robison’s work triggered an immediate panic in New England, which supported the conservative Federalists against the rising tide of democracy. In his Fourth of July address in ...”

“... In the summer of 1797, William Godwin set out on a tour of the Midlands. He had hoped to visit, among others, Erasmus Darwin, but finding the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly provide one since, though Bage was her husband’s ‘very particular friend’, she wasn’t sure she had ever set eyes on him ...”

“... So they levered their way in and started to ask for more – much more. The key figures were William Morris and Abe Lastfogel (who together formed the William Morris Agency), Phil Berg, Myron Selznick (who found Vivien Leigh for his brother David), Leland Hayward and, most significant, Lew Wasserman, Ovitz’s abiding ...”

“... the simple life, it never quite chases the shadows of cruelty and corruption away, and what William Empson called the trick of simplification was always the thing. The mode kept remembering what it was ostensibly getting rid of. Charles Portis’s funny and violent novel True Grit (1968) is the perfect pastoral of the ungallant west. It presents a world ...”

“... softly in response to the scaly protuberances of the extra-terrestrial being. Put yourself in William Kotzwinkle’s shoes. How do you actually go about making a novel from the screenplay of a colossally successful film? Who on earth (or in intra-terrestrial space) is your public? Is it the people who, by some quite unexplainable oversight, have happened ...”

“... The earliest published image of the Greek Revival building by William Wilkins which stretches across the north side of Trafalgar Square is an engraving that shows it under construction in 1836, with the dignity of its architecture masked (as it so often is today) by hoardings covered with noisy advertising. In front of them some violent encounters of the sort familiar to Mr Jingle and Oliver Twist are being enacted ...”

“... a work that Douglas does not mention. Miniature intellectual biographies in the ‘Modern Masters’ style are, at their best, a kind of dialogue between the biographer and the imagined author of a corpus of textual material which the biographer puts under review. Clearly, in work of this scale, the biographer cannot be expected to take account of all ...”

“... Abbey along with the Prime Minister, Kipling, Shaw, Housman, Barrie, Galsworthy, and the Masters of the Queen’s College, Oxford and Magdalene College, Cambridge – all of whom (with the exception of the dons) I recall as slightly marring the solemnity of the occasion by irresistibly suggesting a group of caricatures by Max Beerbohm. Shortly after ...”