“... only one further meeting. Just after the opening of An Ideal Husband to great notices (though Henry James hated it), Wilde bumps into Conan Doyle and asks him if he’s seen the play. Conan Doyle hasn’t. Wilde said with a grave face: ‘Ah you must go. It is wonderful. It is genius!’ And Conan Doyle thinks he’s gone mad. He’s never seen swanking ...”

“... media as ‘the Congo Crisis’ – were funded by Belgian and American business interests. As Thomas Kanza explained a decade later in Conflict in the Congo (1972), the separatists ‘were dependent, ideologically and financially, on the mining companies. Their political motives were dictated by the Europeans who made common cause with them.’ The mining ...”

“... a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and pouncing upon the ...”

“... Nora Barnacle’s hotel might well have been lost on Beckett. He specialised, after all, unlike Henry James, in allowing many things to be entirely lost on him. Like Wilde, he belonged to that group of Protestant geniuses who thought they should speak up just as their land-owning and money-owning colleagues were clearing out of Ireland or learning to keep ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”