“... granddaughter of a sister of Henry VIII. In other words, she had the sort of claim that brought James VI to the throne of England in 1603 (he was a great-grandson of a sister of Henry VIII). By contrast, both Mary and Elizabeth had been officially declared bastards by their father; that had not changed by 1553. So it was perfectly plausible for Protestants ...”

“... veterans of public discussion; others, like William Godwin, Coleridge, Helen Maria Williams and James Montgomery, were just setting out on careers that promised extraordinary achievements. They are unusual suspects because they were not organisers and activists, orators and pamphleteers who urged direct action in support of reform, or who set out to incite ...”

“... Ned, an American whose voice whines like a gnat, manipulates the stupid but beautiful bisexual James in The Sweet Dove Died. Inviting his rival, the fastidious Leonora, to view the ‘exceptionally wide double bed covered in mauve velvet’ in his flat, he enjoys telling her that ‘comfort isn’t all I go for.’Spinsters, clerics, homosexuals – and ...”

“... up.The daisy chain continued to get longer: in 1901 Olive Custance – who eventually eloped with Lord Alfred Douglas – had affairs with both Barney and Vivien. A year later Vivien met Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, nicknamed ‘La Brioche’ for the way she curled her hair, and started an affair. Barney became jealous, dubbed van Zuylen a fat Valkyrie, and ...”

“... in the 1964 election campaign about new technology, little thought was given to this problem. When Lord Zuckerman, as the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, produced a report in 1969 suggesting diversion of effort into the civil field, Wilson rejected it: ‘I am afraid there is no political capital in this because nothing we decide will have any effect ...”

“... subsequently ‘discovered’ and launched as a public performer, she spoke of the time when King James had roamed the country as a gaberlunzie man as if it was just a moment before yesterday. What she sang seemed to her to be fact, or at any rate truth, and her historical sense collapsed chronology. I was moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ...”

“... shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological ...”

“... 1936, a few days after the German invasion of the Rhineland, Nancy Astor threw a party at 4 St James’s Square. As well as being the first woman MP (elected in 1919), Astor was a legendary hostess. To this particular dinner party she invited various League of Nations delegates, the American and Russian ambassadors, an assortment of English friends and ...”

“... Monday night till Friday morning. Opium and its effects here receive the jawgrinding judgment of James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a ...”

“... generalisations of post-colonial critique. He presents, among other specimens, an unfamiliar James Anthony Froude, whose fulminations about native degeneration in The English in Ireland contrast sharply with his early appreciation of Isaac Butt’s version of Home Rule in the 1870s. (The polarisations after 1886, when the Gladstonian Liberal embrace of ...”

“... like it. ‘I’m just having trouble working out what it is you would like to do,’ said Wendy Lord, head of corporate communications. ‘I want to see what you do at Edmonton.’ ‘But we’re quite an old facility. I could arrange for you to visit one of the newer ones.’ ‘I’d prefer to come to Edmonton,’ I said. ‘Just to see how you’re ...”

“... given birth to a son and was shown to have had several lovers. The Daily Mirror had a photo of Lord John Russell ‘In Women’s Guise’ after evidence had been heard about his cross-dressing, and the Express (owned by the moralistic Beaverbrook) had a picture of the baby under the headline: ‘Who Is My Daddy?’ It was a feast, all the more so because ...”

“... behind the lectures was the advocate Henry Home (soon to be elevated to the judicial bench as Lord Kames), a sharp reminder, not least to Smith’s modern-day devotees, of the significant role played by patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, nepotism thrived in the academic dynasties of Scotland’s university towns. Not that merit was ...”

“... is that he seems barely to adjudicate significance; he’s like a child who has taken Henry James’s injunction to novelists – ‘be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’ – literally; he appears to just write down everything he can recall (and he appears to recall everything). It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle ...”

“... or Isidore (‘gift of Isis’), but over time the proportion of ‘Christian names’ like John, James and Peter for men, or Mary, Catherine and Margaret for women, steadily grew. It never became mandatory to have a saint’s name, though by the 15th century an Italian bishop could inveigh against the choice of ‘pagan’ names like Lancelot. The diffusion ...”