“... Prince of Wales’s gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders ...”

“... existence on the plateau Selous was prepared to deny. Singing in that language, the extraordinary Thomas Maphumo has established a world-wide reputation with a musical style that melds a traditional Shona instrument, the mbira, and its bubbling rhythm with influences from rock, soul and reggae – and with political protest. Zimbabwe has horrendous economic ...”

“... in 1918. Of Strachey’s chosen targets, Cardinal Manning was a self-deceiving hypocrite, Dr Thomas Arnold the epitome of earnest Victorianism, who modelled his pedagogic vision on Jehovah’s relations with the Israelites, Florence Nightingale a bedridden female tyrant who drove her devoted male acolytes to early death, and General ...”

“... existed. This world was Q’s cave: a warm, amateurish, freshly-dug hideout in which, say, G.S. Gordon, when he succeeded Walter Raleigh as Merton Professor of English at Oxford, ‘was said to have got the job largely on the strength of his Lit Supp contributions’. In that first year of the TLS’s existence, The Wings of the Dove was reviewed by ...”

“... a migration to other continents, and exponential growth globally. The second volume opens with Thomas Pavel’s thoughtful and informative ‘historical morphology’ of the novel, from Heliodorus to Kafka, which describes a ‘confluence’ of different sub-genres (chivalric romance, elegy, pastoral, picaresque, novella) in 18th-century Britain (and to a ...”

“... What should we mean by ‘Reformation’? Was it a ‘paradigm shift’ of the kind proposed by Thomas Kuhn, a new set of answers to old questions, a Darwinian moment? Perhaps. For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose Reformation was published in 1996, it was not so much an event in the 16th century, or even an extended process, as a constant manifestation of the spirit of Christianity, at least from 1500 to the present day, ‘a continuing story, embracing the common religious experiences of Christians of different traditions worldwide ...”

“... Washington’s connection to slavery has inspired far less examination, and agonising, than Thomas Jefferson’s. Partly this is because of the patent contradiction between Jefferson’s affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’ and his ownership of more than a hundred slaves. Prurient interest also plays a ...”

“... words), whatever the subsequent reports of her deathbed piety and preparedness. The playwright Thomas Dekker described the news of her death as landing ‘like a thunderclap’ among her stunned subjects, who ‘never understood what that strange outlandish word Change signified’.Having ‘studied the Tudors for decades’, Doran tells us that she ...”

“... not alone in deploring the satanic mills of early industrialism. Southern critics of the American Thomas Gradgrinds and Josiah Bounderbys relied on the documentation of reformers and on public reports, not on their own investigations. Furthermore, Thoreau or Hawthorne could be as critical of the age of rail, steam and smokestack as any slaveholding ...”

“... childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem scarcely less bizarre and exotic. We no longer think of ...”

“... the Atocha Station, will find that Ben seems like an older version of his previous narrator, Adam Gordon: same wit, less lying, posturing, drug-taking and freaking out. Also new: political convictions! It might be useful to think of the difference between Adam and Ben as the difference between a character living off non-profit arts funding and a character ...”

“... activities at the White House. Evidence soon pointed to the other accomplice at the lookout, Gordon Liddy, legal counsel to CREEP. The situation was complicated, because in some respects the Nixon administration was investigating itself. The FBI was a division of the Justice Department, and therefore part of the executive branch of the US ...”

“... of American politics than the parallel charge of individual hypocrisy routinely levelled against Thomas Jefferson and other champions of liberty, who happened to own slaves. Institutional hypocrisy can coincide with personal hypocrisy, but it doesn’t have to. It is also consistent with deep personal sincerity, and such sincerity will often be one of its ...”

“... think anyone was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast. At the start of 2008, Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of France, Hu Jintao was general secretary of the ...”

“... Anglo-Saxon and philology. Later a series of women writers and editors – Evelyn Scott, Caroline Gordon, Katherine White, Eve Auchincloss – would offer nurture and support. But Stafford never had much respect for women. The women writers she admired show up in marginal, often diminished ways in the biographies. She named her cat George Eliot, and planted ...”