“... goes for me too.23 September. I knew Hilary Mantel was a good writer long before she fell for Thomas Cromwell (and it was a kind of love affair). I read her earlier novel Every Day Is Mother’s Day about a Northern social worker and found its dialogue funny and enviable. Her much lauded characterisation of Cromwell was harder to take, my feeling being ...”

“... The pool has been comprehensively scooped. Forster got first dibs on the blacking factory episode. Thomas Wright broke the Ellen Ternan scandal. Edgar Johnson had first go at the Burdett-Coutts material. And the editors of the Pilgrim Edition of the letters have forbidden Ackroyd from quoting anything other than ‘occasional and brief phrases from Dickens’s ...”

“... later than Wilson, a black sailor from Boston, was being admired there as a sort of Greek god. Sir Thomas Lawrence found in him the combined perfections of the finest Classical statues, and Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote as enthusiastically about him as he did about the Parthenon Marbles. Having taken separate moulds of all parts of Wilson’s body, Haydon ...”

“... we soon learn, had similar expectations: ‘I had read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Henry James, and I expected England to be the book I always wanted to live in.’ But, Malcolm writes dryly, for Stevenson ‘England turned out to be another book altogether.’ Soon after the publication of Bitter Fame, Malcolm meets her in London at the ...”

“... faisandés tastes and a bluff and hearty roast-beef-and-Yorkshire Englishman; Baudelaire and Henry Fielding combined’). We believe in a personality devoted to art but deploring artiness, cherishing self-expression but abominating self-promotion; just as we are able to glimpse the fashionable ballet-conductor pausing to talk to an alley cat. We ...”

“... tastefully; there are no four-letter words, none of the remorseless physical detail of Henry Miller’s cavortings; Singer’s erotic themes are associated with drives and compulsions. And whereas Miller was able with his excess of physical detail to break through to a self-awareness, was able to demystify male delusions for himself and his ...”

“... author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, relied heavily on Douglas’s Eneados when he translated Books Two and Four of Virgil’s epic into English. Surrey rejected Douglas’s use of rhyming couplets and drew on Italian verso sciolto to create the earliest form of blank ...”

“... Yet Charles gave a free hand to an archbishop seemingly bent on destroying the supremacy which Henry VIII had won for the Crown. Puritans were bound to ask whether Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s power so deeply that ...”

“... unleashed the Turkish invasion, which in two instalments defeated the not very robust efforts of Henry Kissinger and James Callaghan to call a halt, and which had the effect of precipitating that vast shift in populations that was the requisite preliminary to the achievement of the Turkish Cypriot programme of 1964. The Cyprus crisis of 1974 was not a very ...”

“... Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile. In the 1950s Jannice Henry, an 18-year-old doctor’s daughter from Surrey, fell in love with her father’s locum, Neil Micklem. Their affair lasted for years; Jannice hoped it would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter ...”

“... the plague? Gilman isn’t much interested in counter-examples, such as the words of the musician Thomas Whythorne during the outbreak of 1563 (quoted by the historian Paul Slack in his still unsurpassed 1985 study, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England): ‘I looked every minute of an hour when I should be visited as the rest were. I doubting the ...”

“... of French, an early familiarity with Continental art and a lifelong friendship with Bodley’s son Thomas, the future diplomat and founder of the Bodleian Library. On his return he was apprenticed to a leading London goldsmith, Robert Brandon, whose daughter Alice he later married. His subsidiary skills as a jeweller and engraver belong within the ambit of ...”

“... its interests anywhere in the world.’ That goes for some of his own ancestors, like Sir Henry Blake, a ferocious oppressor and landlord in Ireland (though a more liberal governor of Hong Kong); or Sir Thomas Osborne, who made his tenants pay rent in horses, cows and pigs, and preferred to be treated by a vet than ...”

“... labelled ‘autofiction’ – was of little use to Barker. Recalling her first encounter with Henry James, she said that although she couldn’t ‘understand everything’, she felt she was being taken on ‘a profound emotional journey that went beyond mere comprehension’. Not that she’s entirely averse to comprehension. The position espoused by Jen ...”

“... ventures boldly into Anglo-Saxon England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Sperrin sees satire as being ‘primarily ...”