“... Australians takes up less space in Australians: 1888 than in other volumes, but the findings of Henry Reynolds’s chapter on the subject are incisive: for most of the colonists, including many who benefited from Aboriginal labour, ‘the destruction of their society was seen as evidence of their own success.’The Oral History Project undertaken by the ...”

“... by a poet called Donagh MacDonagh, otherwise known as the national orphan, since his father, Thomas MacDonagh, had been executed by the British for his part in the 1916 Rebellion. Later O’Brien paid a visit to Joyce’s father, then living in Drumcondra, where the best English is spoken, who was partly bedridden and expressed the view that his son ...”

“... death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare’. Though there have been other biographies since ...”

“... and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a student at Cambridge in 1850 his mother and eldest ...”

“... dated to the Grand Siècle, the time of the voyages to Mughal India of François Bernier or Thomas Coryate. Distinctions between the more advanced European cultures in the volume or quality of travellers’ tales would be difficult to make for most of the modern period. In the Enlightenment, for every Cook there was a Bougainville or Georg ...”

“... service of God. ‘Bound to obey and serve’ was the motto chosen by Jane Seymour when she became Henry VIII’s queen, echoing the glad subservience still proclaimed by the Prince of Wales’s heraldic emblem: Ich dien.The language of heraldry served as a constant reminder that to engage in service was not simply to undertake a prescribed form of labour, but ...”

“... was an acknowledged masterpiece, produced such works as James Audubon’s Birds of America, George Henry Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies, Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone and innumerable commercial contemplations of flowers, shells and natural novelties. Alternately artistic and sentimental in impulse, the tradition of nature-appreciation inspired works that ...”

“... It is like widows: the longer the old boy is gone the nicer he seems to have been. I think of Thomas Hardy’s first wife. They squabbled for years. He fell in love with another woman, wrote love poems about her. When the first died, and she really was a bit of a heap at the end (she wore boots), he married the second and started writing his love poems to ...”

“... though only in passing, for the very poorest in society prison (to the disgust of the historian Thomas Carlyle) seemed a haven – a place of relative warmth in winter, and relatively good diet all the year round. So as a survey of Victorian prison lives Priestley’s book suffers from its limited source-material: there is much subjective comment, but there ...”

“... 1930s into the literary forgeries perpetrated by two eminent men of the literary establishment, Thomas Wise and H. Buxton Forman. What seems most significant about that story, apart from its being half a century old, is that Carter and Pollard were dealers in rare books, who at the time of their celebrated Enquiry did not hold university ...”

“... constructed through the conflation of such subliterary bestsellers as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Rev Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (the basis for The Birth of a Nation), Gone with the Wind and Alex Haley’s Roots – to which we can now add the O.J. Simpson trial. Rogin does not extend his historical schema beyond 1948, after which it might be argued that TV ...”

“... start was Fred (later Sir Frederick) Brundrett, who when Pincher got to know him was deputy to Sir Henry Tizard and later succeeded him as the government’s chief defence scientist. Between 1946 and 1960, Brundrett gave Pincher ‘scoop after scoop’ in the belief that stories about Britain’s nuclear preparedness would deter a Soviet attack. Brundrett’s ...”

“... they supervised imprisonment orders made anywhere, by anyone, for any reason.’ Chief Justice Sir Henry Montagu, writing in 1619, described habeas corpus as a ‘writ of the prerogative by which the king demands account for his subject who is restrained of his liberty’. It was a remedy developed, primarily, in the court of King’s (and ...”

“... and the writer Franz Werfel, Walter Gropius’s divorced wife and Oscar Kokoshka’s former lover. Thomas Mann, who was one of the guests, offered ‘cordial felicitations on your special day’. Some of Mann’s friends were astonished that he could maintain his friendship with Alma when he had been such a prominent opponent of Nazism. After all, she was an ...”

“... the ‘survivor’ bit. The last poet left standing in the saloon. (Think Gregory Peck in Henry King’s The Gunfighter. Grave moustache succumbing to gravity.) Many myths surround the man, among enthusiasts, cultists and close readers, and this has always been one of them: Raworth is unwell but never incapacitated. The moustache may be a little ...”