“... in 1902 into a relatively prosperous middle-class family; his father was a bank inspector. Like Thomas Lovell Beddoes, an earlier oddball of British poetry, he was sent to Charterhouse School; he can’t have enjoyed it much, for when he was 16 he ran away to London, naively hoping to establish himself as a journalist. This bid for independence lasted all ...”

“... East Coast filmmakers hurried West to seek maximum sunlight and maximum separation from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which demanded copyright payment or else a bullet in the expensive newfangled movie cameras. The canyons and ravines of the Hollywood Hills were the natural redoubts against the Patents Company ...”

“... the dance of Loïe Fuller as taken up by Mallarmé and others, the theatre as reimagined by Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, the applied arts as practised by Emile Gallé and championed by Roger Marx, the sculpture of Rodin as understood by Rilke, the different cinemas of Chaplin and Vertov, and the photography of the Stieglitz circle. In each instance ...”

“... real: Lord Melchett (Morgan’s 19-year-old buddy), Lord Astor and his bride, Lord and Lady Duff Gordon, a Frick, a Vanderbilt, Mr and Mrs Straus who own Macy’s, and also Thomas Andrews, the architect of the Titanic, and Bruce Ismay, a White Star official. Real or fictional, they divide roughly into a group of young ...”

“... dreadful. Top horror is his father, ‘Mad Jack’, who married the sizeable fortune of Catherine Gordon and then squandered it with extraordinary zeal. After his death, in greatly reduced circumstances, Catherine brought her boy up in Aberdeen, devotedly in her way, though violently fond and furious by turns. Everything – except her temperament – changed ...”

“... a sitting duck if the authorities reconsidered their forbearance towards him. His biographers Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns point out that after the Restoration those associated with the Interregnum were liable to have their papers seized. Milton may have felt it too dangerous to keep the manuscript of De Doctrina ...”

“... with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the age of thirty. Ben ...”

“... in his novels and poems as well as the more conventional sequence of biographies (Dickens, Blake, Thomas More) which preceded it. This vision is both conventionally literary and bracingly eccentric; as the constant repetitions and reiterations gather force, Ackroyd seems increasingly determined to disconcert the coffee-table end of his readership by dropping ...”

“... other remarkable versions of essentially the same tale: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River,2 Thomas Keneally’s The Commonwealth of Thieves3 and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.4 The mystery of the stolen continent. Naturally, Australian readers know in advance who did it – and in a sense are still doing it. Newcomers took the country from the previous ...”

“... Street, windowless at ground level, for fear of a repeat of the attack on the bank during the Gordon Riots of 1780, which brought panic and destruction to the City. The bank opened for business the next day, on a reduced scale.You cannot help being struck by the awesome stability of all its arrangements: the paper for banknotes was manufactured at ...”

“... his drinking bouts. Under the prosecutor’s eye he can be made to look like a less amiable Dylan Thomas. The merit of the stories and poems called in to excuse or justify such a life has also been questioned. D.H. Lawrence called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both ...”

“... University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (on the initiative of its bibliophile vice-president, Gordon Ray) acquired the literary correspondence of the publisher Richard Bentley and Sons, principal purveyor of the three-decker novel to the Victorian reading public. At the same time, the British Library (with financial assistance from the Friends of National ...”

“... marches, music and a roll-call of the various craftsmen involved, written in bad verse by the poet Thomas Middleton. The reservoir was soon enlarged, and others built nearby. These served three purposes: by providing a large area of still water they allowed many impurities to settle to the bottom; they helped smooth out fluctuation in supply and demand; and ...”

“... she would not go to jail, before sitting as a member of the House to try her. And when Lord George Gordon was indicted for provoking the riots in which Mansfield’s house and goods were destroyed, Mansfield had no hesitation in presiding at his trial for high treason – of which the jury acquitted him. Once again, it was left to the press to point out what ...”

“... year.) The phrase was used as a way of signalling economic and moral commitment at the same time. Gordon Brown – who liked to cloak redistributive policies in communitarian, traditionalist rhetoric – is said to have been the first to use it, in 1995. The Blair, Brown and Cameron governments all repeatedly claimed to be on the side of hard-working ...”