“... William Frend, George Dyer, John Thelwall, Basil Montagu, John Tweddell, Felix Vaughan, James Losh, Joseph Fawcett. Roe’s research has been strenuous, his attention to detail earnest, and his book will be useful. But it will not be quite as useful as the book which he intended to write, which would have brought poetic text and historical context ...”

“... different from what might be found in the pages of a book. Listen to this, for instance, from III Henry VI, a very early play. Richard, Duke of York has fatally lost a battle: … all my followers to the eager foe Turn back and fly, like ships before the wind, Or lambs pursu’d by hunger-starved wolves. His sons rally to him, and they counter-attack: With ...”

“... had to be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable – to be left alone: what Henry James once described as ‘uncontested possession of the long, sweet, stupid day’: that peace to which no living creature has a natural right. Yes, for a time I was decidedly neurotic on the subject of my friends. I even imagined a kinship with ...”

“... that ‘there is some connection between Burns’s “Vision” and the vision of Boethius.’ James Kinsley’s encyclopedic Oxford edition of the poems and songs has traced this connection, in its assessment of sources for the work. The supernatural devices of Pope’s Rape of the Lock are employed; the division of the poem into sections called Duans ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... wife, Vita Sackville-West, in February 1936 after dining with the Channons: Honor and her husband, Henry, whom everyone knew by his nickname ‘Chips’, but who wasn’t Lord Channon, much as he longed to be. ‘Why am I not very very rich – and a peer?’ he asked in 1924, as a 27-year-old American recently arrived in England. He did become very rich, but ...”

“... expecting the Significant Thing in my life to show up, the vocation,’ he says, recalling James’s too-passive hero in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. But the novel, though disturbing, doesn’t merely mime disintegration. For all the poetic rewards of the childlike individual’s exclusion from life, A Chinese Summer eventually refuses it in favour ...”

“... Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das Meer’ (‘Desolate and empty the sea’). James Miller was the first critic inspired by Peter’s speculations and the appearance of the drafts to attempt a thorough outing of Eliot. His T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land (1977) offered ‘new interpretations’ of much of Eliot’s early work, and found ...”

“... The army adopted a strict literacy standard, motivated in part, as the secretary of war Henry L. Stimson noted in his diary, by a desire to ‘keep down the number of coloured troops’. (Given the inadequacy of southern public education, the literacy requirement also excluded a considerable number of whites. My father, Jack D. Foner, later the ...”

“... to fresh troubles – until the time came for a genocidal pacification, ordered by none other than James I, and Armstrong said his last good night. Nationality counted for very little, compared with family. Perpetually at feud among themselves, a community of predator victims straddled the frontier, as did a population of the defenceless: ‘The poor and those ...”

“... pencil. As late as 1771, at the beginning of the decade of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and of James Watt’s steam engine, the Encyclopaedia Britannica could still define pencils, not as lead pencils with points, but as brushes of hair or bristles used by artists to lay on colours, and could list the materials employed in their making as ...”

“... his translations smuggled into England. He had an in-and-out relationship with the government of Henry VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by Thomas Cromwell to have him sent to ...”

“... the American and British political systems; others still devoted to writers and artists – Goya, James Baldwin, Updike, Greene, George Eliot and, alas, P.G. Wodehouse. None of the essays is uninteresting and many of them have the virtues of the best kind of journalism – they tell you things you did not know and are unlikely to find out in more conventional ...”

“... on spreading the good word that ‘metropolitan improvements’ – the upbeat title of a book by James Elmes which Shepherd illustrated – were steadily bringing into existence a city whose size, wealth and new look were rapidly making it the unchallenged capital of the world. Involved, because, like Dr Johnson and Charles Lamb, Scharf was a tireless London ...”

“... the fiction, or William of Orange in real life (or Sidney himself if it had ever come to that, or James I’s son Prince Henry, whom Sidney never knew), needed no limitation except its own inherent virtue. It is anachronistic to say so, but Sidney’s politics tended to the right as much as to the left. What does ‘know ...”