“... and still less, as he hoped when Austen-Leigh died, to elect him Provost. When his old friend Stuart Donaldson used his influence as Master of Magdalene to offer Benson a fellowship there, kind friends took as much of the pleasure out of it as they could by congratulating him on the skill with which Donaldson had done a classic job. It was a time when he ...”

“... or seven operas flourished in the theatre – nothing could have kept them down; so in the concert hall did the Requiem. All that is utterly changed. Verdi’s 26 operas (28 if you count revisions under new titles) have all been performed; few, perhaps two or three at most, seem unlikely to hold the stage. Julian Budden’s three-volume study is only the chief ...”

“... of the practical responsibility falls to three female members of that family. Of her two sons, Stuart, a policeman, thinks she should be in a council home: ‘Grandma had paid her taxes and was entitled and that was that.’ Charlie, a successful broker, is willing to pay the rent for the house where she lives, and to hire a variety of helpers or ...”

“... before the heads were severed, stuck on ‘traitors’ poles’ and displayed at Westminster Hall as a gruesome deterrent to future anti-monarchical agitators.But Charles II had no wish to acquire his father’s nickname, ‘Man of Blood’. One of the novel’s themes is the tension between Nayler’s determination to apprehend – and if necessary ...”

“... Abyss, there is no evidence that Voltaire ever said any such thing. An English writer, Beatrice Hall, writing under a male pseudonym in 1906, suggested that Voltaire’s attitude to the burning of a book written by Helvétius might be summed up: ‘How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! “I disapprove of what you say, but ...”

“... He notes rather than tests Keith Thomas’s interlinked suggestions that some members of Tudor and Stuart society rarely went to church and that ‘the hold of organised religion … was never so complete as to leave no room for rival systems of belief.’ Little attention is paid to the opinions that landed humbler parishioners in the ecclesiastical courts ...”

“... is ‘unlikely to penetrate average Australia’, dominated as it still is by racist mythologies. Stuart Macintyre, discussing the whole project, put it succinctly: ‘It’s not easy to do justice to the underdog in a volume with gold-blocked end-leaves.’The contradictions which cut between the printed substance and its packaging can also be traced, in a ...”

“... European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her in dismissing the ‘ventriloquist structuralism’ that was in fashion at the time.)‘The Owl of Minerva has spread her wings,’ Rose wrote at the beginning of The ...”

“... There have been active designers – Classicists like Adam, Goths like Pugin, Hellenists like Stuart and Modernists like Venturi, as well as historians (Ruskin, Pevsner, Banham) – who have had opinions on the future as well as the past of architecture. The emulating eye may be self-serving and envious, but it is also challenging and competitive. Goy and ...”

“... Theatre, where the classics were translated into Scouse, seedbed of poetry and stronghold of music hall as well as of the high culture of the Walker Gallery and the orchestras. Arthur Ballard, one of Lennon’s teachers at the art school, has rightly said that it took twenty years’ work to create the culture which produced John Lennon. A deeper study of this ...”

“... Burke, who has recently lost his job at a university development office, and the ultra-rich Purdy Stuart, now a donor to the university, who could get him that job back. Once upon a time the two of them lived together in a collegiate bohemian squalor that masked their class differences. Milo aspired to be a painter but his ambitions never really passed beyond ...”

“... in which iconic images of Welshness were often created by English ironmasters’ wives. Augusta Hall introduced the female Welsh national dress to eisteddfods, established the triple-strung Italian harp as the Welsh national instrument and gave the Cardigan trickster Twm Sion Catti, sometimes known as the Welsh Robin Hood, a wider audience. Charlotte Guest ...”

“... readers. Twenty-five years later, himself caught up in an illicit relationship with a woman, John Stuart Mill was to write On Liberty, in which he identified a new species of liberty: freedom from the tyranny of public opinion. Ainsworth’s Turpin was attractive to his readers because he embodied precisely this freedom. In contrast, the rest of the ...”

“... and all adversity. Was the restoration of Anglicanism the consequence of the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, or the reason for it? With the legal resurrection of the Prayer Book, it could no longer pretend to be wholly consensual. For ever afterwards, the Church of England would be established but it would not be the Church of the whole ...”

“... and law in the Jamaica controversy. He is troubled by the verdict of historians such as Catherine Hall and Stefan Collini that the organised attempts to bring Eyre and others to justice had, in Hall’s words, absolutely no effect. I doubt whether this is the real issue. Practically everything that happens has some ...”