“... they compliment it with kind acts, and their attitude to a non-recycler is rather like General William Booth’s attitude to drunks. The hardcore waste community does not hate its enemies, but feels sorry for them, and in every other thing it says appears to believe a new day is dawning. Though much slower and much less ambitious than the lobbyists would ...”

“... them. Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, started the ‘heiress corps’ with her partner, Anne Murray Dike. For many, it was liberating. Women referred to one another by their surnames, as if they were soldiers or schoolboys, or gave each other boyish nicknames – Tommy, Kit. They were no longer criticised for wearing androgynous clothes; indeed, Vita ...”

“... Jones was staying with the Edes they heard a crash. Ede at once sensed that Jones had knocked over William Staite Murray’s tall vase, Heron, which Murray had said should never be in ‘an atmosphere of nervousness’. Ede himself dropped the Poisson d’Or, denting the nose. (Brancusi ...”

“... was ‘stupid looking’. Edmund Gosse said he was ‘as restless and questing as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of ...”

“... in four major versions, one of which is believed to contain revisions made by the probable author, William Langland, trying to purge the text of its more radical political implications after 1381.Amid all this busy copying, the Pearl Manuscript remained unknown – perhaps even hidden. In later generations, though it was recognised as ‘old’ and accordingly ...”

“... modern lexicography was founded. The great lexicographers of the 19th century, including Sir James Murray, without whose work the Oxford family of dictionaries would not exist today, based lexicography upon the concept of objective historical description. They may not always have been faithful to that concept in practice: but at least they paid lip-service to ...”

“... over twenty-five years ago. Driven by curiosity about my family and my affection for the poetry of William Butler Yeats – an internationally known poet – I saved up a hundred dollars beyond the cost of a one-way ticket and lit out, 20 and cocksure, for Ireland. Several of my generation were going off to Vietnam at the time but I’d drawn high numbers in ...”

“... here as ‘Oliver York’), to whom Carlyle refers several times, as the Irish journalist William Maginn, editor of Fraser’s Magazine and one of its principal contributors when Sartor was appearing in it. Other editors of Sartor have made the same simple identification, and there is some truth in it, but it is not the whole truth. ‘Oliver ...”

“... origins. It was published by Henry Colburn in the New Monthly Magazine under Byron’s name. John William Polidori, Byron’s former physician, claimed it as his own and threatened a lawsuit to recover the rights to it; Byron disclaimed authorship. The magazine promised to correct its error and to compensate Polidori, but the correction was botched and the ...”

“... a crow-gabled sandstone building topped by a silver galleon. It was built in memory of Sir William Pearce, who owned Fairfield’s shipyard, one of the biggest yards on the Clyde, in the late 19th century and was given to Govan by his widow. On the wall inside it says: ‘This is a house of friendship. This is a house of service. For families. For ...”

“... travelled to Taipei and helped draft the league’s agenda; at the league’s 1974 conference William F. Buckley gave the keynote address. And then there was John Singlaub, a retired general and another of the league’s main organisers, who thought the US government had fumbled the urban counter-insurgency against the Black Panthers and other radical ...”

“... bad-trip imagery, like the cut-up technique Bowie used to compose the lyrics, is borrowed from William Burroughs. The title song is introduced with a toe-curling yell of: ‘This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide!’ But that’s soon forgotten in the gloriously overlong, overripe, decadent mess of anarchic guitars, squelching horns and exuberant ...”

“... 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 Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John ...”

“... he said of that time. Snobbery was an even less sympathetic part of the story. When Gilbert Murray got him to write The Problems of Philosophy for the Home University Library, Russell referred to the assignment contemptuously, described it as a ‘shilling shocker’, said it was ‘philosophy for the Midwest’ and intended to enlighten shop ...”

“... is hardly the first study of the social psychology of Jewish emancipation. In the Seventies John Murray Cuddihy wrote on the burdens of ‘civility’ and the ordeal of becoming a gentleman. Numerous biographies of German or English Jews have examined the identity problems arising from first-generation assimilation of minority into majority cultures. It is ...”