“... From 1797 onwards, at any rate, Godwin found himself deserted by former allies and benefactors, James Mackintosh, Thomas Wedgwood, Samuel Parr. In his magnificent open letter to Parr in 1801 he mused on the phenomenon of political apostasy, and restated his faith in the ‘progressive nature of man’, and in the fundamental notions of the much revised ...”

“... of long, narrative colonial histories stretching back to Elphinstone, Malcolm, Grant Duff and James Mill, and is a monument more to his career as an Old India Hand than as a historian. His aim being to rescue the architects of British rule from ‘the oblivion into which they have fallen’, he concentrates on ‘the deeds, motives and thoughts of the ...”

“... fashion, with a few feminist trimmings, is in the same tradition as Ruskin’s ‘The King of the Golden River’ (1850) where his fiercely-held political, aesthetic and ecological doctrines reappear in fantastic guise. In ‘A Toy Princess’ (1877) Mary de Morgan mounts a conventional attack on the conventional Victorian miss; and Frances Browne ...”

“... Centre for Islamic Studies, a body of which he serves as patron.* (Royal seals are not wanting in King Charles’s old royalist military HQ: the other two patrons are the House of Saud and the sultan of Brunei, the latter best-known for his under-the-table donation of a few off-the-record millions to the cause of the Nicaraguan Contras.) Anyway, in his ...”

“... voices and having visions. The conclusion of the Civil Wars and the imminent execution of the king drove him into a chiliastic frenzy in which he anticipated the Second Coming and the conversion of England into a paradise for saints. His visions were erratic and his millenarianism combined strands of two usually incompatible sets of ...”

“... Tamerlane, who put cities to the sword and built pyramids of skulls, was preceded by Sardanapalus, King of Assyria, Byronically bored even as he contemplated the immolation of his harem. Then, perhaps, Herod commanding the slaughter of innocent babies: as De Quincey put it, ‘Herod’s sword swept its nurseries of Innocents.’ Tippoo Sahib, the tigerish ...”

“... of fiction that are outstandingly successful from a commercial point of view – Ken Follett and James Herbert, perhaps – or the most saccharine romance. Instead, it awards its prize to ‘the best novel in the opinion of the judges, published each year’. ‘Best’ is interpreted as ‘most distinguished literary performance’. The ulterior ...”

“... heroes of Empire were never the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened ...”

“... sustained an internal injury occasioned by a strain while batting. In the melancholy death of James Creighton there is a warning to others.’ The American public exploded at the news, and one of the consequences was that baseball became firmly established as America’s national pastime in the years leading up to the Civil War. Then, during lulls on the ...”

“... relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal match with the French King’s brother, Francois, Duke of Anjou. It would be an inexpensive way of turning Anjou’s unpredictable and unprincipled cavortings in the French and Dutch religious wars to England’s advantage. Elizabeth’s prime minister, Lord Burghley, thought so. But ...”

“... his first volume of poetry, Mount Zion (paid for, intriguingly, by the Surrealist patron, Edward James), and, with the Shell Guides, moving into broadcasting and publishing, Pevsner was restarting his working life from scratch. He was studying the hide-bound establishments of British industry in the West Midlands, interviewing with amazement Kidderminster ...”

“... and acoustics are extraordinarily nimble, but can even so be seen as tricksy. A late poem by James Merrill, from the collection A Scattering of Salts, receives a brilliant and enjoyable decoding here, as the body shapes in the word ‘body’ are revealed in a poem set out with a head and shoulders and torso, the o ‘like a little kohl-rimmed ...”

“... number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than can be counted on two hands,’ James Wood wrote, ‘yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers.’ Leader quotes this early in the book and goes on to split the moral difference. ‘Though opinions will differ about the morality of this calculation,’ he ...”

“... Orwell’s political prose to the kind of scrutiny ordinarily reserved for the novels of Henry James. John Sutherland has been reading and rereading Orwell ever since the 1954 BBC dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four alerted him to the novel’s existence. So he feels under no constraint either to bless or to damn a writer whose ...”

“... the epoch in which humans have had a significant impact on the planet. In Against the Grain James Scott describes these early stages as a ‘“thin” Anthropocene’, but ever since, the Anthropocene has been getting thicker. New layers of human impact were added by the adoption of farming about ten thousand years ago, the invention of the steam ...”