“... whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of Shakespeare (and then of Landor). For these are not the very words ...”

“... in a quite unprecedented way on their right to pass judgment on the deeds of important dead white males, and to tell and publish the story of the polities that they lived in. Bridget Hill neglects this broader intellectual context for a more narrowly biographical approach in this study of Catharine Macaulay, but hers is still a considerable achievement ...”

“... an infuriating wallflower, eavesdropping on the glorious beauty of Shelley’s marriage to Mary. Richard Holmes’s unsurpassable biography, Shelley: The Pursuit, written in the ‘golden years’ of the early Seventies, was the first to rescue Claire from the patronage of the Shelley-worshippers and to introduce her as a political thinker, who not only ...”

“... in the printing trade. The bulk of the forgeries were manufactured by the eminently respectable Richard Clay and Sons. The firm cannot, over a period of twenty years, have turned out a hundred or so piracies and ‘creative forgeries’ without someone noticing that their work was circulating in the second-hand market under false colours and at hugely ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... as self-reliant, smart and funny. Just when you’ve had more than enough reflections on why Richard Dawkins is probably, unhelpfully, right, Mrs Barnes steps in with a put-down. As an adolescent I once hid a tape recorder under the table during dinner in an attempt to prove that, far from it being the ‘social event’ my mother decreed every meal ...”

“... But the same is true of manuscripts.Cotton may not have known what he had. His librarian, Richard James, labelled the manuscript: ‘Vetus poema Anglicanum in quo sub insomnii figmento multa ad religionem et mores spectantia explicantur’ (a poem in old English explaining many religious and moral topics using the figure of the dream). It was not ...”

“... Peterloo, framed by a Radical conspiracy devised by Hunt, Samuel Bamford and the newspaper editor Richard Carlile, a ‘free-thinker’. The TLS published an acerbic review of Walmsley’s book whose anonymous author was later revealed to be E.P. Thompson. In The Making of the English Working Class, the second edition of which was published in 1968, Thompson ...”

“... viewer’s superior TV-knowingness. ‘Image-Fiction’, as he called the progeny of DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), was in danger of becoming similarly tainted. Though ostensibly aimed at ‘reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago and appearance’, it ‘most often ...”

“... Korda’s Charmed Lives, Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers, Bernard Malamud’s New Life, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, John Cheever’s Selected Stories, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, William Golding’s Rites of Passage, Anthony Burgess’s One Hand Clapping, P.D. James’s Cover her ...”

“... themselves to Shavian relics, such as cuttings from GBS’s beard. ‘Cut a wisp off the nearest white dog,’ Shaw advised, ‘it will do just as well.’ In his disenchantment with the human species, it was sometimes amusing for Shaw to observe the animated quarrels of his acolytes. Loewenstein, a stout, dark middle-aged man with a homely if forceful ...”

“... studied. In our day, the political bias has resurfaced in the racist hypotheses and conclusions of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. One of the twins in Neubauer’s study later remarked, ‘This is nightmarish, Nazi shit,’ while the psychiatrist involved in the study confessed: ‘In those days we were playing God.’ Satan, I’d ...”

“... as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 biography of Pepys, Richard Ollard said that there clings to him ‘an irresistible air of bedroom farce’, with ‘furtive lecheries so vivaciously pursued’. The earlier multi-volume life by Sir Arthur Bryant had done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery ...”

“... their children. Colin Osman is a retired gentleman who lives in Cockfosters. His plumage is white and grey; his eyes are fast-moving; and his body is wonderfully puffed-up and proud. Mr Osman has devoted much of his life to the sport of pigeon-racing, just as his father did, and as his grandfather did before that. It used to be the most popular ...”

“... precision. This, coupled with the memoir form, put me oddly in mind of a book by his contemporary, Richard Rayner. The Blue Suit is also a coming-of-age work with an Oxbridge protagonist and intelligence recruiters in the wings; the two books even mention the same superstar literature don (I shall call him ‘George’, since that is his name). And both, for ...”