“... of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation during intercourse.’ This suggests the intercourse might be less than fervent, my name in itself something of a detumescent.28 April. The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should ...”

“... texts that look extensively at the slave trade – Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (1688) and Thomas Southerne’s stage adaptation of it (1695) – are structured by the motifs and conventions of revenge tragedy: resentment, conspiracy, delay, the grand soliloquy and, above all, tortured bodies.Reflecting on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the ...”

“... Bryan Blundell was a supporter of a school for poor children which is still open today, while Thomas Leyland, as mayor, ‘was a terror to evil doers’. Leyland also became a partner in a bank jointly run by the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe, whom Melville singled out as ‘good and great’. Lawyer, art collector, botanist and public ...”

“... a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching ...”

“... like to hear more of the doctrines adopted by Burke’s closest Irish friend, the Catholic Bishop Thomas Hussey, who may have attended him on his deathbed. Dr O’Brien ought, I suggest, to have made more of the Anglican rhetoric to be found in Burke’s Reflections, just as he ought to have made more of the English and Whiggish themes in the making of the ...”

“... of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is no paradox to say that we are ...”

“... or a version of it.Dickinson’s work first appeared in 1890 in a volume co-edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Julie Dobrow’s After Emily attempts to rescue Todd’s reputation by offsetting her bad behaviour against the extraordinary labour she devoted to transcribing, editing and promoting Dickinson’s work. It also chronicles the trials ...”

“... of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, John Beegan senior describes himself and his two sons, John Leo and Thomas, as stonecutters. Ten years later, in the 1911 census, he chose the term ‘monumental ...”

“... of Carpenter’s best stories, Auden’s marriage and more particularly its immediate aftermath. Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika – who though once-married was not very likely to marry again – was a cabaret artiste whose heroically anti-Nazi material had lost her her German passport, and who therefore approached the nearest Englishman, Christopher ...”

“... critic, having assured Elena that anyone who finds her novel risqué is an idiot who hasn’t read Henry Miller, gets drunk and assaults her in a lift. Meanwhile, Elena’s university friends are too caught up in workers’ rights to take her novel seriously. As one classmate puts it, ‘You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the ...”

“... the reformer Granville Sharp prosecuted a man named Stapylton who had taken his runaway slave, Thomas Lewis, forcibly on board ship. The trial judge, Lord Mansfield, tried to evade the moral issue by directing the jury that the case depended simply on whether Lewis was Stapylton’s property. The jury returned a verdict that Lewis was not, but Mansfield ...”

“... or no danger to the country. If asked, in fact, they would probably agree with the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has said that you cannot trust a person who never lies about sex. The case against Clinton was also doomed by pervasive hypocrisy. The media that thrives on sex and violence postured shamelessly as Clinton’s moral judge. Some ...”

“... away from his earlier uncertain styles, which were close enough to Auden and Yeats and Dylan Thomas to be called vaguely Modernist, even faintly distractive. The speech he found was in direct contrast: a weighty, easy and conversable social intimacy, occasionally spoken of later by critics in terms of the British bar parlour. And certainly, this was one ...”

“... retold (they have been best explained before in instructional texts, like Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson’s wonderful but technical The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation), and even hard-to-follow business dealings are presented with something approaching the same intensity. (I found myself in a state of acute anxiety at several points ...”