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“... 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 ...”

“... labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times changed’. ‘Like a ...”

“... institution’: racial slavery. The leaders of the Confederacy, explicitly repudiating Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that ‘all men are created equal,’ had committed themselves to racial hierarchy. ‘Our new government … rests,’ the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, observed, ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not ...”

“... from the after-effects of a childhood cricket injury.Biographers of Grey, including the latest, Thomas Otte, have taken these three incidents in their stride, granting them a few incurious sentences at most. Instead they have dwelled on Grey’s love of homely nature: his passion for fly-fishing and bird-watching, his long weekends in Hampshire, his ...”

“... considered as outcast children’. Toussaint Louverture, the best known of them, was followed by Henry Christophe, who declared himself king in a hereditary monarchy. Historians have mocked him for his crowns and gorgeous uniforms. But Colley comes impressively to his defence. In 1811, a monarchy might still attract an international respect denied to ...”

“... I might be an important person.4 October 1997. Dinner at the country house of the Baroness Dunn. Henry (‘Taipan’) Keswick and the now ex-ministerial but ever-amusing Richard Needham are fellow-guests. A heated disagreement between them about Chris Patten’s governorship of Hong Kong flares up and amicably subsides. Entirely by chance, we meet the ...”

“... J.A. Symonds, Pater, the always dependable Shakespeare and Michelangelo, Whitman, Marlowe and Henry Scott Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come ...”

“... mulatto and house-nigger (Ariel) rather than a field-nigger (Caliban).’ In ‘Talking Black’, Henry Louis Gates, searching for a black critical language with which to read black texts, describes the same problem from a different point of view. How can we write or read the text of ‘Blackness’? What language(s) do black people use to represent their ...”