“... They were consumed not only by dilettantes or libertines, like Horace Walpole, John Wilkes and James Boswell, but also by landowners, clerics and society hostesses – Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s confidante, owned several jestbooks and comic miscellanies. In this context it becomes easier – though still not entirely easy – to understand the ...”

“... Havana); his predecessor, Pat Rabbitte; several prominent trade unionists; the historian Paul (now Lord) Bew; and many writers and journalists, including Ronan Bennett and sometime Ireland correspondents of the Guardian and the Sunday Times. It would be hard to spend even a day in Ireland reading the papers, listening to the radio and watching television ...”

“... fell into sublime lakes and cracked his head on interestingly gnarled trees while Peacock’s Lord Littlebrain moved mountains of earth at vast expense to make his grounds look more natural. But by then a generation was saturated with the aesthetics of the Picturesque, which had sunk so deep as to be invisible. Keats vibrated like a tuning fork to ...”

“... to a tennis and hiking friend, ‘I want ghosts who do things. I don’t care for the Henry James kind of ghosts. I want real sepulchral ghosts, the kind that knock you over and eat fire . . . none of your weak, shallow apparitions.’ As a man who read to his adoring children, he would have loved Harry Potter and ...”

“... to it) that a ‘beares skyne’ appears on Henslowe’s list of the properties possessed by the lord admiral’s men in 1598. It is partnered there, according to the same diary entry, by one ‘lyone skin’ and by Phaeton’s ‘lymes’ and Argus’ ‘heade’. The last two stage properties were clearly man-made, but the rest? Lion skins were not in ...”

“... and expect you to do the cooking yourself’. Towards the end of his life, his attacks on Henry James, Katherine Mansfield – a ‘neurotic, sick woman’ – and even Chekhov, whom he’d once admired, were frequent and hysterical. For good measure, he began to make disobliging remarks about mass-educated white-collar workers. ‘They have no ...”

“... and Van Hire. 10 March. To Bradford for the provincial premiere of The Madness of King George. The Lord Mayor is present and R. sees him afterwards in the Gents, mayoral chain round his neck, trying to have a pee. His badge of office dangles just over his flies so that he has to take great care not to piss on it. Eventually he slings it back over his shoulder ...”

“... his Miscellaneous Works, including an edited text of the autobiography, by his friend and executor Lord Sheffield. The two latter enterprises bear particularly on the controversy over the 1776 volume, and on questions arising from Gibbon’s (and Sheffield’s) responses to the French Revolution. This is therefore not a study of the Decline and Fall, or ...”

“... in an organic and effortless ebb and flow. This is how he describes the sinister and sadistic Lord Devon when he comes with his henchmen, Mr Benjamin and Mr Poole (‘Their hats were small black dinghies beached upon their wigless heads’), to round up the printers and burn down the printworks: ‘His lordship did not so much as lift an eyebrow. He ...”

“... curtain on the emissaries of the leading nations to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Britain’s Lord Castlereagh, the future suicide, was remembered at home by Lady Morgan for ‘his cloudless smile ... his untunable voice and passion for singing all the songs in The Beggar’s Opera’. In Vienna he behaved like the Ulster Protestant he was, staying in ...”

“... its Columbus. Within a few decades this continent had been exploded, mostly by its anti-Columbus, James Cook, and crumbled into a multitude of islands in a vast ocean, mapped, measured and ready for invasion by beachcombers, traders, whalers, missionaries, colonial administrators and, in their wake, historians. The voyagers, equipped with scientists and ...”

“... understaffed, the Bari base – under the command, as it happens, of another Communist, Major James Klugman – had to decode and re-encode all traffic between Frank and Cairo in both directions. The matter of the code-books was at last sorted out, just before Frank and Sergeant Scott crossed the frontier into Bulgaria, when they were immediately involved ...”

“... papers’ were transcribed for the prompt book, licensed by the Master of the Revels as the Lord Chamberlain’s deputy, annotated by the prompter, and divided into actors’ parts. Publication, whether in authorised or unauthorised editions, or in the Folio collection of 1623, involved further interference, sometimes by scribes and always by ...”

“... and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no whole of it ... Rather, it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is one to speak?’ Which, indeed? One matter which ...”

“... a Second Class, was surely employable? Matthew was bailed out by his father’s Whig connections: Lord Lansdowne took him on as private secretary with minimal responsibilities. He pulled in some £288 a year and an additional £480 from an Oriel fellowship (Oriel had not yet tied its fellowships to Schools, and Oriel was Dr Arnold’s old college) – not bad ...”