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“... got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson; but even they arrived by what might be called the bohemian route. There are of course other ways in; anybody can see how much space the dons occupy in the respectable papers and magazines. Many moved in by routes that did ...”

“... needed prints of their works to spread their fame and standing. From 1829 until his death in 1837, John Constable grew increasingly preoccupied with printmaking and collaborated with the young engraver David Lucas to translate his oil sketches and paintings into 22 mezzotints, part of what would become known as English Landscape Scenery. Proofs survive, and ...”

“... desperate hours on Malta, describes the moment when the veteran grand master of the Knights of St John, Jean de La Valette, leapt into the gash the Turks had made in the bastion of Castile, after the other fort on the island, St Elmo, had already fallen.‘Come, my knights,’ he cried. ‘Let us all go and die there! This is the day!’ When his staff urged ...”

“... James I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a commonplace practice of the age, produced a succession of improbable adventures, among them (as if in compensation for the Puritan closure of the theatres) the ...”

“... Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the time, and took it out on her accordion, playing Strathspey reels until the red varnish flaked off her fingernails. In our town it was all in the words. Nobody was ever ‘dearly’ anything, certainly not ‘departed’. ‘Deceased’ seemed a bit high and mighty, even ...”

“... the end of the First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to ...”

“... Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For ...”

“... Benjamin was surrounded, clubbed, impaled with lances, shot with arrows, then scalped. Rachel took her little boy James and began to run, but, as she wrote after her release, ‘a large sulky looking Indian picked up a hoe and knocked me down.’ Silas Parker went for his bag of shot and was soon killed, as were the other men who remained in the fort ...”

“... stockholders into saints. When it came to sorting the saved from the damned, New England Puritans took wealth to be a most propitious sign. The fortune you amassed here below testified to your fortunes in the hereafter. No culture has ever found a better spur to hard work – the Puritan ethos famously makes for a spirited form of capitalism. The United ...”

“... the chains from the mad at Bicêtre asylum in 1793 (a much celebrated event that never actually took place), or John Conolly abolishing the use of restraints on his arrival at Hanwell asylum in London in 1839. As John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account, myth and reality ...”

“... looking off to the left. Emma’s mother, Margaret Caldwell, thinks her husband, Willie, took the picture. Her daughter was, she says, determined to get off heroin, an addiction which began after her older sister died of cancer and which forced her onto ‘the drag’, the red-light streets just west of the city centre. She would get clean and then ...”

“... I have recently read The History Men by John Kenyon. I remember reading a different book, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, some years ago. I did not find Bradbury’s book at all funny, which I am told it is intended to be. After a careful reading I had not the slightest inkling of what the book was supposed to be about ...”

“... In the poem which provides John Wain with the title of this book Yeats is addressing the dead Gore-Booth sisters and telling them, quite tenderly at first, that now they’re dead they know it all – all the folly of a fight For a common wrong or right – so that it seems dying has enabled them to catch up with him, for he knew it and stayed alive ...”

“... so familiar are Dr Hill’s views, and so telling the many criticisms of them, that a book which took them as a major theme might now be redundant. One of Professor Ashton’s problems may have been that his book took him a long time to write, and that as a result many of his original views may have been challenged by the ...”