“... a small fortune in the art of ‘lending existence to nothing’, as Edmund Burke defined poetry. Thomas Hardy gave her the blurb of a lifetime when he said that the two greatest things about the United States were the skyscrapers and Edna St Vincent Millay. Her poems are still in print, and her famous lines still recognisable: ‘Euclid alone has looked on ...”

“... title implies, sanctuary seeking led to tense, unpredictable situations. The most notorious case, Thomas Becket’s murder in 1170, was shocking not only because he was slain in his own cathedral, but because on returning from exile he had explicitly sought sanctuary there. Only the public penance of Henry II and an exceptionally rapid canonisation could ...”

“... besides betting on a market for his photographs, had also commissioned a history painting from Thomas Barker, for whom Fenton’s work was to provide the equivalent of preparatory drawings. The purpose of his trip – Fenton arrived in March 1855 and left in June, three months before the fall of Sebastopol – wasn’t to document the unfolding war as much ...”

“... together on a single shield – that Throckmorton sent from France to Elizabeth’s chief adviser, William Cecil. When the English complained about Mary’s ‘injurious pretensions’, the French backtracked, and claimed that ‘the bearing of the English arms’ had been ‘done for the honour of Elizabeth’ – i.e. Mary was proud of their cousinship. No ...”

“... relations in the United States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, Grant’s ‘peace policy’ and Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal – the fact is that whites from ...”

“... was agreed that England’s competitive advantage could not be allowed to depend on their labour. William Cobbett spoke with an ironic edge in the House of Commons in 1833: A most surprising discovery has been made, namely, that all our greatness and prosperity, that our superiority over other nations, is owing to 300,000 little girls in Lancashire. We had ...”

“... gave pain to the bears but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.’ Hahn has it that Colonel Thomas Pride killed the bears of Southwark with his own hands, but other accounts say he had them tied by the noses and shot by militiamen. On his deathbed he is supposed to have said: ‘The first thing that is upon my spirits is the killing of the bears, for ...”

“... the conflicts’ as they claw their way up the academic ladder. For Marjorie Garber, William R. Kenan Jr Professor of English at Harvard, the university, if not a utopia, is nonetheless a satisfying environment where intellectual controversy reigns. Garber believes that academic jargon is actually ‘language in action’, marking ‘the place ...”

“... scenes evoked purely for their own sake. This returns us to Kleinzahler’s New Jersey precursor, William Carlos Williams, and his deceptively simple rallying cry, ‘no ideas but in things’. Of course the things that get thrown up by the New Jersey landscape are rarely conventionally beautiful, yet many of Kleinzahler’s most compelling poems work by ...”

“... list of authors. Lord Byron, David Livingstone, Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone, Samuel Smiles, Herman Melville and Washington Irving were all published from Albemarle Street. J.M.W. Turner and David Roberts provided illustrations for Murray ...”

“... figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ‘gamechanger’ of ...”

“... to the throne (Meredith must have been thinking of George IV and Maria Fitzherbert, as well as William IV and Dorothea Jordan). Roy’s mother died on his fourth birthday – ‘I remember to this day my astonishment at her not moving’ – and the success of his ‘claim’, which gives his life meaning, depends on his ability to prove that the marriage ...”

“... in chalk. In trying to write this biography, the narrator is inspired by the first biography of William Blake, by Alexander Gilchrist, which was completed by Gilchrist’s widow after his death: ‘She had to see if she could imitate his voice.’ The narrator is writing to keep up ‘a topic of conversation’ with Enriqueta. The book’s Spanish title, La ...”

“... summer, and a single further number in May 1729. It was written by Jonathan Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan, a clergyman, schoolteacher and man of letters, and grandfather of the playwright. It includes at least two of Swift’s important works, his critique of the Beggar’s Opera in No 3, and a reprint of the ‘Short View of the State of ...”

“... Jacobean tragedy, but there were enough of them and of attempted assassinations – the murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous plots, in both his kingdoms, on the life of James VI and I – for threats and rumours of regicide to place nations on recurrent high alert. In life and ...”