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“... line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her preface, and one might almost suppose that the spur for writing this book came to her from the arrival of a hoard of Boaden volumes from a relative’s ...”

“... haunts the books under review. A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the ...”

“... the rivalries of race, region and class, pronunciation is obviously important, and grammar too, as William Labov has effectively shown in his studies of Black English: but the most visible differentiations are borne by idiom and vocabulary. What you call things raises you up, puts you down, or sets you just where you choose to be. (When I was a boy, we called ...”

“... more than a page to the paramilitary group Tara, best-known for the links between its founder, William McGrath, and the notorious Kincora child abuse scandal. Although Tara has not been held responsible for terrorist outrages, many of the people who later became key figures in both the UDA and the UVF began their paramilitary careers there. The ...”

“... a bad poem and one of his favourites. By the time he attends the trial of the radical William Frend in the Senate House at Cambridge, he is already so seasoned by political warmings and coolings that his biographer can accurately say the trial ‘revived his political sensibilities’. Revived, at the age of 20; but it seems to have been true, and ...”

“... coveted and every altar required for consecration was treasure. Rulers cast their greedy eyes, as William of Malmesbury wrote in the 12th century, on a church with its ‘boxes of gold and silver full of dead men’s bones’. A king might want to melt down that gold to pay soldiers. The wonder-seeking faithful prized the stuff inside: namely, dead bodies or ...”

“... were not shocked by these affiliations. An unknown refugee in 1938, Broda, was vouched for by Sir William Bragg, president of the Royal Society, on the strength of having been the assistant of a Viennese physical chemist whose work Bragg thought well of. In 1942, James Chadwick, though well aware of Nunn May’s ...”

“... No bond was more important to him, or longer-lasting, than the friendship he forged with William Morris at Oxford. Morris, too, had flirted with the Church – much wealthier than his friend, he once contemplated using his inheritance to finance a monastery – but by the time they left university ‘we were both settling in our minds,’ as ...”

“... playing on mental associations, the villains deploy skills that resemble those of Collins himself. William Wilkie Collins was born in 1824, with a large, deformed head and tiny feet, to a governess who had wanted to be an actress and a painter whose pursuit of wealthy sitters had turned him into something of a snob. The actor ...”

“... choice between the 79-year-old Lord Dundonald, who was tottering on the verge of insanity, and Sir William Parker, who himself thought he was a fraction past it at 73. Which left only Sir Charles Napier, a mere 67 but a hopeless alcoholic with a vile temper. The commander-in-chief was the 66-year-old Lord Raglan, who had lost an arm at Waterloo but had never ...”

“... he published the first of his books to be written in English, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius. His parents stayed in Germany where, soon after his father’s death in 1940, his mother killed herself to escape the camps. Pevsner and his family were to remain permanently in this country.The idea for The Buildings of England ...”

“... remarked that ‘he never knew any child reared with so much difficulty.’ Decades later James Boswell pictured Johnson in childhood, grappling with disease and burdened with premature sagacity, as ‘the infant Hercules’. For Thomas Carlyle, in 1840, Johnson was the first hero as ‘man of letters’. Unlike his German counterpart ...”

“... which he established in Vincent Square in 1826 under the guidance of the educationalist James Buchanan, and where his daughter was enrolled. Buchanan’s childlike imagination and simplicity instilled in Bodichon and many other pupils an awareness of the natural world and the beauty of music and art. In 1849, aged 22, she began attending the ...”

“... to be ‘maiden ladies and foreigners with long hair, and educated Englishmen did not sing’. Sir William Henry Hadow, a leading educational reformer after the First World War, remembered the schooling he had received in the 1870s by noting that music had beenthe reluctant substitute for cricket, all the more bitter because it carried the suspicion of an ...”

“... The schoolmaster William Johnson is remembered for three things, although not under that name. He wrote the most famous of all translations from Greek lyric verse, ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’; he wrote the words of the ‘Eton Boating Song’; and in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust ...”