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“... alive. ‘When I was dead, my spirit turned/To seek the much-frequented house,’ begins ‘At Home’, whose speaker discovers that her former friends are still enjoying themselves and expecting tomorrow to be better, because they have a tomorrow to look forward to:I shivered comfortless, but cast                    No chill across the ...”

“... and are proud to be just about decipherable in the blurred background of a majesty-mayoral-chain-lord-lieutenant-town-crier framed photo on a mantlepiece of honour in a spit and polish house just like all the houses of the house-proud little people they’ve ever seen. They know the scent of fresh paint, of just-crimped lawns, beeswax, Cardinal Red ...”

“... in September 2013 showed no improvement, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for schools, Lord Nash, wrote to tell the school its funding arrangement would cease and that it must close. The Discovery New School was the first closure, but not the most notorious. The Al-Madinah School in Derby was forced to close its secondary school when ...”

“... walking tour, leaving his clothes on the banks of the Danube to suggest that he’d drowned. (Lord Cockburn, a family friend, feared the influence of Young Werther and ‘a sudden Germanising of the noddle’.) He reappeared in Edinburgh two years later, still not cured despite the excruciating interventions of a Hungarian surgeon; eventually a French ...”

“... when the Muggletonian Reading Room in Bishopsgate was blitzed. These boxes have now found a home in the British Library as Additional MSS 60168-60256, thanks to the good offices of Noakes’s widow, Thompson, William Lamont and others. What to do with this equivalent, for the archaeology of sectarian nonconformity, of Howard Carter’s discovery of the ...”

“... this is that Gascoigne did not produce the blinding line or the sumptuous phrase for T.S. Eliot to home in on. No ‘bracelets of bright hair about the bone’ here. Indeed, his one poem in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse contains the exquisitely execrable lines ‘And popt a question for the nonce,/To beate my braynes about’. He certainly ...”

“... Lancashire cotton-spinner’). And on a few occasions we stumble on episodes that would be more at home in the Alice books or even Monty Python, such as this account of a group of London police constables between the wars: They clubbed together to buy used BBC classical records from a Shaftesbury Avenue shop. They circulated among themselves copies of the New ...”

“... Here and there McWilliam does catch a glimpse of the Claimant as a more timeless figure: a modern lord of misrule, the ultimate inappropriate person. His childlike greed, his knee-jerk lusts, his refusal to be cast down, make him irresistible in a ghastly sort of way, and it is hard not to sympathise with him through all the ordeals he brought on himself. The ...”

“... Swinburne, who proposed that Romeo was a satirical representation of the queen’s aged counsellor Lord Burghley, ‘the first and perhaps the strongest evidence’ being the ‘impossibility of discovering a single point of likeness’, for ‘this would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all-powerful ...”

“... only an adherent, and although my theology and politics have changed, I consider it a cultural home – but one to which I cannot return. That is both a sadness and a relief. But it’s the reason the present debate in the SNP seems to me like a fever dream or a bad bout of Covid. I cannot believe this is happening; where am I, and why does my face feel so ...”

“... palatinates, territories to which the king’s writ did not run. Instead, Castor explains, the lord of such a region ‘had the right to exercise judicial authority within its borders in the king’s name and on his behalf’. Richard was earl of Chester, and when he was at odds with Parliament he could more easily recruit men and resources from the ...”

“... ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’. If the soldiers seemed lacking in imagination, the journalists who accompanied the expeditions more than made up for it. Bennet Burleigh, their doyen, had a ...”

“... heard about ‘people who sold surplus factory items on a television programme called Shopping at Home. Models walked back and forth in front of the camera wearing clothes or jewellery that hadn’t sold in stores, while the announcer worked up his audience by saying that the item’s retail value was a hundred dollars, but anyone who called in the next ten ...”

“... it has the qualities Auden praised in Jane Austen’s work, when he wrote (in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’) that You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effect of ‘brass’, Reveal so frankly and with ...”

“... London hospital consultants and those elsewhere, and most of all between the prima donna figure of Lord Moran and everybody else. But the hospitals could not survive as they had been. There was no likelihood that the voluntary ones could go it alone because the level of taxation was high enough to preclude the charity they would need. Collecting silver paper ...”