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“... religion is more likely to start from parish wills than from the study of church and state. John Vincent’s Poll-Books pioneered a history of politics ‘from the bottom up’, though Vincent now seems to prefer the study of prime ministers. ‘History on the ground’, originally almost a personal obsession of ...”

“... bound her wrists and feet ‘like a goat’. A 15-year-old, who had been visiting the UK from St Vincent since she was nine, was raped at gunpoint by three men as a way of settling financial scores with her father. Disowned by her grandfather, who had brought her to the UK, she ended up at Yarl’s Wood as part of an immigration crackdown: ‘I thought ...”

“... engagements with prostitutes patronised by other members of the libertine Hellfire Club. In 1776, David Hume reported that Banks and Sandwich had gone fishing, joined by ‘two or three Ladies of pleasure’. Everybody knew this sort of thing about Banks, and there’s no evidence that he much minded the satires or that they did him any damage. Wealth has its ...”

“... a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed to be basking in the long peace of which Robert Walpole boasted to the queen in 1734: ‘Madam, there are fifty thousand men slain this year in Europe, and not ...”

“... problematic account. Neither of them could decide about the painting’s meaning, however. Vincent Carretta suggested that it might well be a satire; John Gilmore, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, simply ignored it. Though the V&A eventually moved the picture out of the furniture galleries, its modern curators, too, didn’t know what to ...”

“... off once more with small, deliberate steps.’He got a job accompanying the popular chansonnier Vincent Hyspa, whose satirical lyrics Satie set to music. Their first song together, ‘Un dîner à l’Elysée’, is about a dinner party thrown by the president for the artists of Montmartre: the conversation is stilted, the wine runs out, and the ...”

“... of my life and put it on paper’, as she told Prouty, under the influence of, in turn, Edna St Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Roethke, Virginia Woolf and Stephen Vincent Bénet.When her friend Ann Davidow left Smith after one term, Plath’s first letter to her, written through tears, told her that although ...”

“... letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless ...”

“... Westland Row, hope to bump into no one between here and the bank, especially not Gerald Dawe or Vincent Browne, who both have offices there. Nothing against them really, but it’s mid-December, no time for meeting anyone. Pass by Sweney’s Chemist. Lemon soap. Viagra nowadays, Bloom would buy. Lemon Viagra. Mr Beamish the old bank manager gone now, gave ...”

“... and the final natural but charged image that gives the poem its conclusion and title.’ As David Kalstone pointed out in Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, however, the poem was not simply a homage to Bishop and her work, but a way of using her tone and then moving away from it, a way of separating himself from her ...”