“... rule them despotically. It is acknowledged, however, that he had sponsored the researches of Sir William Jones,4 which had laid scientific foundations for the truth that Hindus and Muslims had laws and knew what property was. Hastings, of whose guilt Dr O’Brien is in no doubt, is a complex figure, though less so than that strange mixture of villainy and ...”

“... of the latter occasions have long been in the public domain, not least because the young William Empson occasionally attended (he did so, with characteristic Empsonian brio, without actually going to any of the lectures). The lectures were eventually published, in an exemplary edition by Ronald Schuchard, in 1993, and since Schuchard had access to ...”

“... had brought out crucial differences between the two men which each had refused to see: as William Haller said long ago in his astute and still highly readable Early Life of Robert Southey (1917), the scheme was thrilling to Coleridge as a philosophical experiment, while appealing to Southey chiefly as a set of rules. Coleridge, ever eager to find in ...”

“... would have had to relate the history of Western Europe in the 17th century, a subject his friend William Robertson had not explored; and the history of the succession to the English and Scottish thrones would have involved him in issues, still very heated, on which his own family had shown Jacobite leanings and of which radical Whig readings were being ...”

“... States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony ...”

“... he had been drinking heavily that weekend. At 51 Western Road, a bathing machine proprietor called William Birkin overheard some of the row on Easter Sunday. He heard Bill shout: ‘You bloody rotten cow – You rotten bugger.’ The couple were using ‘the filthiest language I had ever heard’, Birkin said. The next day he saw Rose Gooding with her eye ...”

“... began on 8 May 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by its chairman, Parnell Thomas, and its chief investigator, Robert Stripling, ‘set up shop’ at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. The first response by the industry to notice of an investigation appeared forthright and dignified. A Committee for the First Amendment was formed, and ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”

“... England and Scotland. Even the most sophisticated of travellers might be homesick and the painter Thomas Jones was one of those who found that the ‘increasing phantom’ of loneliness disappeared at the inn ‘where we lived in the English fashion’. In time the family owned two more inns in Florence and their visitors’ books reflect the social and ...”

“... makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature ...”

“... the lawyers who stood between the accused and the gallows commanded admiration, and none more than William Garrow, the most successful and most celebrated defence counsel of the later Georgian years. To Langbein, however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as Thomas Erskine, a more ...”

“... 17th centuries, alongside which later Viennese classicism appeared a bland retreat. When you hear William Byrd and Thomas Tallis for the first time, you don’t know where things are going; there are weird harmonies and tonal shifts, curious crooked cadences that loom suddenly from unlit verges. And such dissonances! In the ...”

“... that his body was altered in some fundamental way; there was a frog or serpent inside him. In 1685 Thomas Willis judged the melancholic-hypochondriac patient to be prey to ‘wandering pains, also cramps and numbness with a sense of formication’, as well as low spirits, wandering attention and fear of death. Since then the term ‘hypochondria’ has ...”

“... can be traced in the records of domesticated herds and their surpassing individuals. William Pitt’s report to the Board of Agriculture on the state of pig-breeding in Staffordshire in 1796 includes an engraving of an anonymous painting of a pig belonging to Mr Dyott of Freeford Manor, Lichfield. The pig’s coat is dark, the snout long ...”

“... are by Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage and William Carlos Williams, and there are two ‘letters of protest’, the second written in a sort of Finneganese, and long thought to have been the work of Joyce ...”