“... of Balzac, Flaubert and George Sand, and alert to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was ...”

“... loyal support of the Crown during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and they engaged the lawyer Philip Carteret Webb. The Jewish Naturalisation Act (the ‘Jew Bill’) was finally passed in May 1753, but during the general election of the following year it became a focus for City, High Church and Tory opposition. ‘Here, for the first time in English ...”

“... betrayed Marlowe before. There was ‘malice’ between them: this is the word used by Sir Robert Sidney in his report on the case, sent over to Lord Burghley along with the deported counterfeiter, ‘Christofer Marly’. In his Note, Baines announces that ‘one Richard Cholmeley was persuaded by Marlowe’s reasons to become an atheist.’ This brings us to ...”

“... in Florence; did they hang up Machiavel, or did they molest him?’ Twenty years later, Algernon Sidney, the republican martyr and would-be regicide, echoed Nedham and Harrington in his own Discourses. He noted that Machiavelli found ‘virtue to be so essential’ to liberty ‘that he thinks it’s impossible for a corrupted people to set up a good ...”

“... They were supplied forthwith: Titian’s ‘Rape of Europa’; Rembrandt’s 1636 self-portrait; a Philip IV by Velazquez; Rubens’s Earl of Arundel – all for what seemed at the time phenomenal, that is to Say, ‘American’ prices. The proceeds from this stupendous bonanza enabled Berenson and his wife to instal themselves in I Tatti, already dreaming ...”

“... relationship.’ The whole experience brought home to Virginia a difficult truth. She wrote to Philip Morrell: One cant, even at my age, believe that other people want affection or admiration; yet one knows that there’s nothing in the whole world so important. Why is it? Why are we all so tongue tied and spell-bound? The greater openness with her ...”

“... Soup canvases – one was of Beef Noodle – in a group show called The New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, a place up to then known as ‘the leading emporium of American abstract art’. When a collector threw a party for the artists on the opening night, Larry Rivers and de Kooning turned up only to be turned away by the ...”

“... than is sometimes admitted. The party’s executive wing has always distrusted the membership – Sidney Webb referred to ‘groups of nonentities, dominated by fanatics and cranks and extremists’. Many in the trade unions are wary of the urban, middle-class skew to the membership, especially the active membership, and are jealous of their own remaining ...”

“... change Clause 4 of the Party’s Constitution, indelibly inscribed on the tablets of stone which Sidney Webb had brought down from Mount Sinai in 1918, was something quite different. Crossman’s tribal instincts and his loyalty to the Left made him anti-Gaitskell here. ‘But,’ piped up the intellectual, ‘of course it’s true that the anti’s, led by ...”

“... mother refused to pay for his second year at Wisconsin). There he came under the spell of Sidney Hook, who was making waves with his lectures on Marxism. The attraction, for Schwartz, wasn’t ideological. (‘Political insight does not coincide with literary genius,’ he pronounced.) As he saw it, Marx stood for the historical factors that shaped ...”