“... labour. In the 16th century, when the political process rested less on institutions and more on informal networks and shared expectations, a regime was only ever a few steps away from disaster. Robert Cecil knew only too well how much work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William ...”

“... fired as fourth cook on a Boston-to-Washington dining car, and had yet to learn to want anything more than a good time. On any morning that summer, Little might have brushed shoulders with the slender, watchful Ralph Ellison, passing through the Harlem YMCA, where Little roomed for a time only a block away from Small’s. Ellison was preparing himself to ...”

“... on her tomb in Westminster Abbey have been carefully polished in the expectation of ever more flower-strewing pilgrims: at this rate she is liable to find herself transferred from her inconspicuous position in the cloisters to the very centre of Poets’ Corner. Unfortunately for Todd, the burgeoning Behn industry in which she has secured such a ...”

“... ruled by the advice of a devil and that his reign would bring destruction to every man’s door. More alarming still, because it was so generally believed, was the rumour that the deposed Richard had escaped from his captivity and was still alive, waiting off the coast of Scotland, ‘in an island called Albion’, until the day appointed for his return in ...”

“... namely, dead bodies or pieces of them – bones, dust, scraps of blood-soaked cloth. So an even more puzzling question arises: why should the holy dead need their mortal remains to do great things? Other cultures and religions have also venerated their dead, whether ancestors in general or a special class of holy persons – Hebrew prophets, Shi’ite ...”

“... The enterprise in any form, of course, involved a crushing weight of primary research: there are more than two hundred and ninety volumes of Francis Place papers in the British Museum. Mr Miles found working through them ‘arduous’ if ‘fascinating’. Because of their great bulk he took ten years to finish his biography (having, in a manner worthy of ...”

“... something of an oversimplification, but not all that much. The tradition is rich and unbroken: in Thomas Elyot’s Latin dictionary of 1538 we find aedificium ‘building’, in Bullokar’s English dictionary of 1616 the minimally anglicised edifice ‘a building’, in the 1979 Collins edifice ‘a building’. For all their bright newness, dictionaries of ...”

“... Prince of Wales’s gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders ...”

“... attracted to the alleged possibility of a pre-colonial historiography of tropical Africa rather more than forty years ago, when thinking about a book entitled On the Trail of the Bushongo, the latter not being a rare quadruped, as I had at first thought when opening the book, but an equatorial tribe or people of whom I had not previously heard tell. The ...”

“... not the alcohol that is making me sleepy. What is happening isn’t even sleepiness exactly, more a minor existential crisis. Still, I suppose the assumption is fair, given the smell on my breath – and this is enough to get me moving. The process is slow and painfully deliberate, but after a moment of supreme effort I eventually, miraculously, get to ...”

“... Jinnie Fullerton. This horrible cough! Kind souls. Perhaps their prayers will work with a few more Hail Marys thrown in. Connie or Jinnie (never mind which) murmured ‘The Lord has delivered you into our hands.’ 2 ‘No personal God or any such nonsense’ – Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp to Murry, spouse, from Villa Isola Bella, Menton, 18 October ...”

“... Fliess family and discovered by Peter Swales among the Fliess papers in Jerusalem. We learn much more about Freud’s relationship to Fliess, especially about his extraordinary devotion to Fliess’s odd – if not crackpot – views. Masson, however, does not make any suggestions as to the basis for this attraction. The edition still contains only half the ...”

“... the character of a deliberate debate’: what was at stake, according to Barrell, was ‘more the ownership of the word’. Put most simply, the charges and counter-charges boiled down to the question of who was guilty of imagining treason, who actually imagined the King’s death. The first part of the book talks about the terms available for such ...”

“... is, with his father, the hero of his story, it is Bevins, Vollman and a preacher called Everly Thomas who deliver most of the lines. Joining these three are a throng of shades – each ‘wronged Neglected Overlooked Misunderstood’, as Willie puts it – who are eager to retail their own stories of woe. This is a ghost story, in other words, narrated by ...”

“... were heartily glad to be rid of her, she fouling our house mightily.’ Captain Cook had more success when the Resolution arrived in Woolwich in 1775, carrying birds and animals purchased by Johann Reinhold Forster, the expedition’s naturalist, in South Africa, and intended for the queen. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was waiting on the ...”