“... 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 ...”

“... for example, when Thomas Girtin was nearing the height of his fame as a landscape ‘genius’, Lord Elgin offered him £30 a year to carry out a pictorial survey of Greek monuments in what was then Turkish territory; ‘and as lady Elgin possessed a taste for drawing’, a 19th-century source informs us, her husband ‘wished to know whether he would ...”

“... of Fashion, a parody of the short-lived vogue for belly pads that sprang up in London in 1793, and James Gillray’s Dido, in Despair (1801), which lampoons Emma Hamilton’s scandalous pregnancy by Lord Nelson. Seven months gone, Hamilton is portrayed as a grotesque battleaxe, arms and legs outstretched as she rises from ...”

“... free of all that had ever oppressed him. No cross was there to say that this was ground that the Lord still held. What he looked out upon was the sign of a broken covenant. The place was forsaken and his own.In his introduction to a book of critical essays on O’Connor, Harold Bloom argues that there is a gulf between O’Connor the lay theologian and ...”

“... is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s ...”

“... than his father’s because of its connections with royalty (she was remotely descended from King James I of Scotland); at school, he boasted so much about the (alleged) venerability of his title that he was facetiously nicknamed ‘the Old English Baron’. Occasionally the pretension turned more prickly: invited to join a formal procession, he sulked for ...”

“... fit easily with the mainstream English novel from Austen and Thackeray to George Eliot and Henry James. The Brontës are a long way from the genial, civilised, ironic tones of that tradition. Perhaps this is partly because they were only half English, and their father came from a country whose literature was always more Gothic or Romantic than realist. They ...”

“... of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the outlaw wordsmiths, the rescue operation, this time round, falls to Bradford, a professor at the University of Ulster who’s already written biographies of the Amises, father and son, plus Larkin, among others, and isn’t ...”

“... from behind, forms Mad Men’s logo. Either he is surveying the immense territory over which he is lord and master, or he is pondering some facet of his existential dread. Don is supposed to be the profound one. Around him is ranged a toybox of tin stereotypes. The format of the show is to suspend a backstory and subplot from each diminutive ...”

“... According to Henry James, reviewing John Cross’s life of George Eliot, the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind, shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr Cross’s volumes than the absence of any indication, up to the time the Scenes of Clerical Life were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors ...”

“... Verga, the verista novelist admired and translated by D.H. Lawrence (and discussed here by James Wood on 10 August) – is the key to Sicily, where people like to explain, over the most concentrated espresso drunk anywhere in Europe, exactly why everyone else’s version of an incident or situation is flawed, self-interested, corrupt or downright ...”