“... we don’t know the feature that influences a prayer that we pray, we should fall back on the Lord of the Nose.’ In an ecstatic trance he was going to leave behind his worthless, handsome body and ascend a mystical ladder to join with the godhead, the transcendence of his soul so absolute that his body might accidentally die. This was the Death of the ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... the hospital I spent a mad month or more rewriting everything in my three books’ – Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally rose to air and the present with Life Studies. I felt that I had hit the skies, that all cohered. It was ...”

“... relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... stylised composure; and Whitman’s composure finds its equal among American writers only in Henry James. With majestic aloofness, he likes, as he says early in Song of Myself, to be ‘both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it’. And like the games James plays in The Turn of the Screw, Whitman’s are ...”

“... dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour was a baronetcy conferred by James I in 1622, largely to raise revenue; the first baronet must have been a disappointment in that regard, as he went to prison for debt in 1629 and again in 1638. His son and heir was imprisoned for political reasons in 1646, and pardoned in 1651. The third ...”

“... a better novelist than herself, and expressed a fear that she might ‘turn into a writer like James Joyce’; there was little danger. In the flurry of chatter and prophecy that preceded the publication of Daphne du Maurier the main emphasis was on the novelist’s homosexuality. Chatto’s handout spoke delicately of ‘her highly significant friendship ...”

“... asleep. Tell them I ...’ From her temporary bed-clothed refuge the much-desired Flora could be Lord Jim tailing off into ellipsis, caesura, the cut-off. She could also, of course, be on a page of dotted Irish playfulness by Sterne or Beckett. Banville knows, hereabouts, what his house and lineage are. And his readers should be up on what to expect in the ...”

“... ironically opens with the self-slaughter of one of the Revolution’s most implacable foes, Lord Castlereagh. And irony holds the key to 19th-century attitudes towards self-destruction. From pulpits down to penny-dreadfuls, Victorian moralists, absolute for improvement, respectability and duty, could not condone the coward’s escape. Hence, as Gates ...”

“... Blacks in Britain was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and lectures at adult education centres, schools and ...”

“... with that of Christ himself (‘Was ever grief like Ours?’ he regally complains. Would Our Lord have used the royal ‘we’?). There are some particularly rich examples of this sort of semi-knowingly misattributed verse in the scant body of poems said to be written by James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, of which ...”

“... became German Kaiser, King of Prussia, Summus Episcopus of the Protestant Church and Supreme War Lord. There are precious few life-enhancing moments in this miserable saga, and Röhl milks the sheer awfulness with deadpan relish. If Wilhelm is presented as a monster in the making, he is surrounded by a cast of characters who act out of ...”

“... of the 1760s had a field-day with a heroic John Wilkes (‘Wilkes and Liberty’) and with Lord Bute as Public Enemy Number One (no fewer than four hundred anti-Bute satires appeared, mainly sporting a jackboot and a petticoat inscribed ‘no petticoat government’, in reference to Bute’s alleged liaison with the King’s mother). The American ...”

“... Chum Padraig Sairseal’ (‘Farewell to Patrick Sarsfield’), a tribute to the vanquished Lord Lucan written after the Siege of Limerick in 1691, and among the earliest utterances of an untutored Gaelic voice: At the Boyne Bridge we took our first beating, From the bridge at Slane we were soon retreating, And then we were beaten at Aughrim too ...”

“... the Labour Party’s – and Kinnock’s – problem was vividly illustrated by what happened when James Callaghan resigned the leadership late in 1980. At that point the new machinery for electing the leader – designed to outweigh the traditionally right-wing bias of the Parliamentary Labour Party – had not yet been established, and the election was ...”