“... they were targets for demolition. At the beginning of the century Ruskin and his development by William Morris stood as a landmark in ideas about art and society. He was, as is so often reported, the writer most mentioned as an influence by the new Labour Members of Parliament. But by 1932, to take only one example, his social criticism was being ...”

“... had also noticed that some of the theatrical portraits the Russell-Coteses had collected, such as James Archer’s Henry Irving as Charles I (1873) and John Collier’s Lewis Waller as Monsieur Beaucaire (1903), were really very fine. I had also begun to feel defensive about genre painting, which seemed to be eminently respectable when executed by ...”

“... Old Town of affluent citizens, leaving behind the poor. At the Tron, according to the historian William Knox, ‘social rank often became meaningless and a spirit of conviviality and general bonhomie enveloped the gathered crowds.’ Not always. On New Year’s Eve 1811, several New Town gentlemen were relieved of their valuables and a widely despised ...”

“... operations when she was only two weeks old. By 1914 Humbert had been transferred a step upwards to William Beveridge’s new Labour Exchange Department, the inception of social security in Britain. Rejected (because of his weak lungs) by the Forces, he fought with courage and adroitness in the endless war between government departments, distinguishing himself ...”

“... that matter – spotting conspiracies where others see epidemics: no less a man of the people than William Cobbett was adamant that Asiatic cholera itself was a fiction invented by the powers-that-be to hold the masses in terror. Indeed, as Steve Watkins underlines in his book, the Left in many of its moods has traditionally suspected that the medical ...”

“... to be Greekish’. A ‘classical Cockney’ was on a par with a ‘hottentot in jackboots’. William Hamilton brought home the Barbarini Vase in 1783, and running short of cash, sold it to the Duchess of Portland. The renamed Portland Vase began to exist in a host of reproductions, in some of which the nude figures were suitably draped. In her novel The ...”

“... to translate Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. He abandoned a (now lost) dramatic tragedy about William Wallace after two acts, and his best-known poem, ‘Auld Reekie’, was envisaged as a work in more cantos than the magnificent one and a bit that survive. Fergusson’s oeuvre, as we have it today, consists essentially of brilliant, occasional, often ...”

“... like his poems, had a wilful, manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll from William Guinneach Gunn to Thompson William Gunn – Thompson was his mother’s maiden name.) It was clear, too, that he enjoyed his own style, his wit, his urge to dismiss what was dull and cautious, to celebrate what was ...”

“... for medieval culture. (Readers who prefer modern English can consult the excellent translation by William Granger Ryan, published by Princeton in 1993.) Pious instruction, sensational entertainment, conservative propaganda, erotic titillation, sacred violence – the Golden Legend offered all these and more. Most obviously, it offered a way to hallow ...”

“... Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant reflecting telescope, on a mission to map the southern skies and observe the return of Halley’s Comet. Now, the Sun reported, he had trained his ...”

“... strategic and maritime benefits conferred on the empire by the Caribbean. The radical journalist William Cobbett, a rather unexpected ally of the slaveholders, believed that the planters ‘ought to be scrupulously attended to, as if they were farmers in Cornwall or in Yorkshire’ and were ‘entitled to the same protection in their persons and fortunes, as ...”

“... started slowly. Before the First World War, smoking had doubtful associations for most Americans. James Buchanan Duke’s American Tobacco Company pioneered the manufacture of desire by surrounding cigarettes with Orientalist fantasy, but the unintended consequence of such advertising was to reinforce the connection in the popular mind between smoking and ...”

“... His present-day biographer inherits a tradition of controversy dating back a full hundred years. James Anthony Froude, the first of the succession, had been Carlyle’s friend and disciple for thirty years, and it was to him that Carlyle entrusted the keeping of his posthumous fame. As he worked over his master’s papers, Froude never forgot his ...”

“... between love and honour with a level of hair-splitting nuance that would do credit to Henry James. Meanwhile, Marlowe’s breakthrough blockbuster and its author were forgotten, as Charles Saunders’s indignant claim for the originality of his own play Tamerlane the Great (1681) makes clear:I never heard of any Play on the same Subject, untill my own ...”

“... Morse had. Born in South Carolina and descended from a Quaker family that came to America with William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania colony, Morse was another wealthy suffragist and an early patron of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. In 1924 she married Taraknath Das, a leading Indian nationalist, who had become a US ...”