“... he felt he ought to be performing some sort of public service. Conan Doyle, notoriously, had no wish to be remembered for Sherlock Holmes. Some word-spinners stood for Parliament, but tended to spoil their chances by putting up too many ideas of their own. Haggard, who had turned gentleman-farmer in Norfolk, fell into this trap when he stood ...”

“... unlike those of his master Carlyle, were defined by his commitment to the life of the family. No Victorian artist painted children with more attention and intensity. It was typical of Brown to focus his magnum opus on a baby’s face. The model for the child was his own son, Arthur, born in 1856. Work became in part an elaborate memorial for the boy, who ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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. ...”

“... up with strangers’ disgusting bodies is what nurses happily do for low pay; but then, there is no question of monotonously dealing in just what seems most private, fruitful, of their own: We worked on vaseline. That means we smeared ourselves with loads of vaseline and then afterwards got the sperm out. I only had time to wash after every four or five ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it? The first thing to note is that Lawrence went to Oxford. As an Oxford man myself, I have no hesitation in identifying Aldington’s main problem as being that he did not: he went to University College London. ‘Untruthful! My nephew Algernon? Impossible! He is an Oxonian.’ This quotation from The Importance of Being Earnest served as the epigraph ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... isthmus accessed by Shard-branded retail tunnels as dark and soul-sucking as a labyrinth with no centre. The era of station hotels has passed, those convenient stopovers at Charing Cross or Victoria before some Continental adventure or connection with a transatlantic ocean liner. London Bridge station, like its neighbour, Guy’s Hospital, is a tolerated ...”

“... to the war. Halfway down the forms ask: Do you need anthrax? Do you need smallpox? We answer no. I had the first anthrax injection in London last week. Paul hasn’t been vaccinated for either. You’re supposed to have three anthrax injections to be protected. We catch the end of the briefing, which turns out to have been mainly for those journalists ...”

“... 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 ...”