“... from the glaze in beholders’ eyes. Searching for the ‘real’ one is like chasing quarry in a hall of mirrors. In this delusive environment, Flint is an admirable Ariadne, who guides us close to the source of the reflections. She unwinds three distinct threads. First, she exhibits Columbus’s reading and map-reading. She scours the margins of his ...”

“... Ben Jonson became the first English dramatist to publish a collected edition of his own plays. No doubt The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, a folio volume of more than a thousand pages, brought a sharp satisfaction to its author. The indignities of an earlier career as a bricklayer could scarcely have been more roundly redeemed. Only the malice of a ...”

“... were awkwardly placed in mid-Victorian Kensington. Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of ...”

“... that he had to ‘destroy’ his valet because he ‘threatened to propagate a report, and I had no alternative’. Whatever the truth, the event became a family legend, part of the romantic penumbra with which his son, vividly educated, imaginative and inheriting a clutch of family grievances, surrounded himself. The young Jones, named for the Duke, was ...”

“... a eugenicist brothel where Aryans were brought together to procreate. By 1947, Mann was no longer welcome either in Germany or in the US. According to his FBI file, he had been a ‘premature’ anti-fascist and was now under suspicion as a fellow-traveller, yet he was too melancholy for cold warriors in either country to take seriously. Regular ...”

“... series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be ...”

“... defeated military attempted guerrilla raids from their shelters on the North Downs. Religion was no consolation. Fundamentalist clergy wandered the back roads and river paths between Staines and Richmond, calling for divine retribution. They died raving, in the rubble, doctrine decayed into a stream of incoherent curses. ...”

“... rolled into the square in a blue Bedford van. He came towards the house in the style of someone in no great mood for ice-cream and jelly, and within minutes, having scanned the television pages of the Daily Record, he threw the entire party out of the living room – Jaffa Cakes, Swizzle Sticks, cans of Tizer, the lot – all the better to settle down to a ...”

“... and the Treasury. This person compared the ethos of the Home Office to that of Millwall fans: ‘No one likes us, we don’t care.’ Home secretaries see the world in Hobbesian terms, as a dangerous and frightening place, in which vulnerable people are robbed, murdered and blown up, and these things happen because the state has failed them. What’s ...”

“... and Boon’ was right up my street. Raphael was there, sitting on the floor in the packed main hall of Ruskin College where he taught adult students, amid dozens of historians from both inside and outside the university. He looked like the eternal student himself in jeans and bomber jacket, long hair flopping over his eyes as he smoked a roll-up. ‘A bit ...”

“... The constituency included Hull University, which had an active New Left led by academics such as John Saville, a historian and founder with E.P. Thompson of the New Reasoner, a forerunner to New Left Review. Many trade unionists and working-class Labour supporters, who Gott hoped would be responsive to his criticisms of Wilson’s leadership, also lived in ...”

“... enough to trigger compulsory evacuation, he wouldn’t be able to sell up in the normal way; no lender will offer a mortgage on his flat. Only cash buyers will buy unremediated flats, and they can force desperate owners to sell at a big loss. But Morris still has to pay his mortgage. ‘If you add the service charge,’ he said, ‘I’m paying upwards ...”

“... is untrue, but it certainly created a buzz. The play ran for ten consecutive performances – no mean feat in the quick-change repertoire of those days – and the first edition, published in January 1728, sold out in a few weeks. This stir of interest had little to do with Theobald’s reputation as a playwright, which was rather middling: his most ...”

“... period from the birth of Whitman to the death of T.S. Eliot. It could be said that before Whitman, no American poet of real gifts wrote American literature; and after Eliot, none wrote anything else. Between these two points, two cultures, already to different degrees and in different ways interdependent, began to produce a fused, rich and ambiguous ...”

“... expected when an eminent Communist is involved: newspapers are always eager to show that there is no sense of equality or justice among Communists, that they have no difficulty in accepting the idea of élitism (the word springs to mind as soon as the Ecole Normale is mentioned). But it was not inevitable that this terrible ...”