“... to Lucretia, he quoted Burke to justify his claim that ‘the image of crime, made execrable, may pain and revolt us, but for that very reason, it does not allure or corrupt.’ It was partly such self-justifications that provoked James Thomson’s judgment on Bulwer-Lytton in 1874: ‘he was one of the most thorough and hollow humbugs of the age; false ...”

“... poems as well. I haven’t seen them yet, but I doubt if they will be much good. Of course, they may be, but I have my misgivings. Anyway, what does he want with publishing poems: it is no time for poetry. God knows what it is a time for. Larkin, of course, was no slouch when it came to skewering his literary rivals. In these early years, though, he is ...”

“... Victims of Oppression, Violence and War, and then dropped at sea at the site of the sinking. I may have missed something, but the wreath-laying seemed to take place almost unnoticed behind a press of tourists, without announcement or microphones. Neither the sinking nor the commemorative wreath was mentioned during the service. The stress was on ...”

“... might replace the lumpen profile of Canada Square and its tower hard by, in the basements of which may be found a mean and dispiriting shopping centre – an object lesson in how not to build underground public space. North Greenwich and Canada Water, cheaper comrades in gigantism, cannot match the assurance of Canary Wharf. Both opt for mosaic cladding, a ...”

“... they were not tortured: they held very different beliefs about the supernatural. Confessions may be tainted by having been extracted through torture, but the verbatim record of interrogations can still tell us a good deal about the beliefs, and (as Lyndal Roper has shown) the psychic dramas, of the accused. Of the dozen books discussed here, Clark’s ...”

“... was to continue Barrett’s thought in the strange, feverish poem ‘Mesmerism’. Martineau may have been a tougher character than Barrett could envisage – a journalist, after all – and some of the sympathy may have been misplaced; but not Barrett’s admiration for a woman who shunned ‘the tendency of women ...”

“... any messages of inquiry, until one day he is found to be quietly making history all on his own. It may turn out to have done him no good, but his case remains a salutary warning to anyone who persists in writing the history of Africa without the Africans. Any explication of the ending of Lisbon’s colonial wars has to be centred on the coup of 25 April ...”

“... side of the border, declaring the diversionary nature of all Lancastrian texts to be axiomatic may seem as much a disabling manoeuvre as an enabling one, since it substantially forecloses on the possibility that a document really can mean what it says. The more carefully wrought a text is, the more fruitful Strohm’s assumption generally proves to be, but ...”

“... She destroyed her own papers, and told her story as she wished it to be heard. Arthur Jones may or may not have been the father of her secret child; it was just as likely that Jeanne was the daughter of the Prince of Wales or Louis Battenberg. But he accepted the role, from something of a distance, and while she hid ...”

“... is not to fall victim to an ahistorical taste for 19th-century art for art’s sake (whatever that may be): it is to acknowledge a historical situation. Although this art was produced at a particular time when knowledge was itself construed as pictorial in nature, the Dutch artist’s trust in representation has continued to play a central role in the Western ...”

“... or two or three million seasonably adjusted, excluding school leavers’. Readers of this book may want to question whether the kinds of factor Brittan discusses as lying behind the rise in unemployment have changed sufficiently and are powerful enough to explain the vast deterioration in economic performance that has occurred all over the world since the ...”

“... snatching at social and sensual experience than ever before. On the famous day of Friday 13 May, 1785, he made love to a whore twice before breakfasting with the Quakeress Mary Knowles, went to a Quaker meeting, watched Lunardi go up in a balloon, visited the Bedlam hospital, dined with a famous lawyer, found himself dead drunk singing songs in St ...”

“... until two years after the Regency was established, he repeatedly describes her as a Georgian. That may be justified if the implication is that her intellect was formed early in her life, but to establish the point would take a deal more exploration of the discernible intellectual influences than the professor provides. It would take more than exploration to ...”

“... gone to Saudi Arabia, leaving a broken marriage behind? One or other of her conversation partners may be responsible. There are brief excursions from the central dialogues: one to the old lady’s husband, Robert, who hears a susurrus of women’s voices in his flat in Positano. Beneath the old woman’s bedroom, by a convex mirror (whose symbolism is ...”

“... in bandages, thereby disguising himself for the benefit of the pilot – hardly accustomed, one may suppose, to seeing his fellow Monegasques similarly attired when they have dental troubles. The fugitive was subsequently said to have been seen in the Caracoles restaurant in Barcelona, at the Plaza Hotel in Montevideo, and at the Cistercian monastery of ...”