“... Presbyterian goals, a tenet that has endured, with a more secular inflection, as Graham Walker and James Greer recognise, in Ulster Protestantism’s contractarian – and seemingly casual – commitment to the rule of law. The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the ...”

“... will appear in the autumn, along with the collected works of Jefferson in one volume, one of four Henry Adams volumes, and one of four Emersons. James will fill eight volumes, and the first, soon to appear, includes Watch and Ward and four other early works. His critical writing will occupy two volumes, which will be not ...”

“... Students of the life and works of Walter Scott and James Hogg may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants ...”

“... was the era of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, when the masque was at its extravagant height under James I, and in 1613, around the time this portrait was painted, Lanier composed his first masque song, ‘Bring away this sacred tree’, and performed it at court in The Squires’ Masque. Lanier was looking for advancement and perhaps having his picture ...”

“... flight from the city itself, along with what Defoe might have learned subsequently from his uncle Henry (who remained in London and shares the initials of Defoe’s narrator), compensates for this. Gilman is a superb close reader, which goes a long way to redeeming an often tendentious book. Gilman is at his most persuasive in a powerful reading of Jonson’s ...”

“... hardened up what seems to have been hours of musing with Ranson into unfairly selected quotes. In Henry V when the messenger enters and tells the Lord Constable, ‘The English lie within 1500 paces of your tents,’ he asks: ‘Who hath measured the ground?’ The notorious problem with forensic evidence, cold on the page or presented to a jury, is that it ...”

“... outrageous performances as a Goon Show script or a night at the music hall. Amos Barking, alias Henry Swansea (the name under which he enlisted in the Civil Service), is a professional liar who in some hard-to-pin-down sense is searching for the truth about himself: in other words, he is our old friend the unreliable narrator. His story, however, is a ...”

“... deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds Henry Bate and William Jackson, successive editors of the Morning Post, who gave themselves up to sparrings and scandals, and whose journalistic darts were dipped in poison. They were reckless and factional men in a reckless and factional age: E.S. Turner has ...”

“... of election to the House of Representatives on the Whig ticket, the timing was dreadful. President James K. Polk, a Democrat, had just declared war on Mexico. Along with many other Whigs, Lincoln denounced Polk, incurring the charge of disloyalty to the troops. Then the Whig Party confirmed its meretriciousness by nominating Zachary Taylor, a returning ...”

“... as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those old fellows are done,’ he was to be heard insisting. ‘Exploded! ... Fichus! ... No good! ... Finished!’ Lewis’s beef was with literary ‘impressionism’: with novels which sought intricately to render the movements, at once furtive ...”

“... Auden always in some sense stayed at home: a friend he met after his translation to America, James Stern, later described him as ‘the most unalterably English, the most unlikely expatriate’, and Nicholas Nabokov similarly spoke with affection of Auden’s ‘clumsy laughter, his assertive way of telling not quite exportable (English ...”

“... Abrahamus Trippie and Jacobus Depre. (The two Jacobi would, of course, be Jacques in French and James in English. Mullett is elsewhere written as Millett, and Trippie as Tippey.) Mountjoy puts up £20 – half of the required bail – to guarantee their appearance at the forthcoming Sessions of the Peace, where they are ‘bound to answere their ...”

“... North-West. They had been running Westmorland like a giant pocket borough since the heyday of Sir James (‘Wicked Jimmy’) Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale: a man Thomas De Quincey called ‘a true Feudal Chieftain’, notorious for his ‘gloomy temper and habits of oppression’. Wicked Jimmy went to a better (or worse) place in 1802, at which point the ...”

“... from coast to coast, she never got divorced and never gave any trouble, so she doesn’t come into James Fox’s story much; and neither does the eldest Langhorne sister Lizzie. Lizzie just got on the others’ nerves and was poor. There were also three brothers, but they don’t come into the story at all. They drank a lot, as did many Southern gentlemen ...”

“... my visit to Frank I went with friends to visit the grave of the Anglo-Welsh Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan. We read aloud a passage from Vaughan’s ‘great poem’, as Frank rightly called it, ‘The Night’, a great and quite a cryptic poem. The passage was discussed by him in a sermon, learned, lucid, by no means arcane, one of his finest ...”