“... a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms akimbo. This pose of the fat man of authority (it is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used ...”

“... problem, in the Section’s eyes, was unemployment. The younger economists in the Section, notably James Meade, developed the approach outlined by Keynes in the General Theory published in 1936. Robbins himself had initially rejected Keynes in favour of the ‘classical’ position, but was in process of being converted and was content to leave the younger ...”

“... The suicides of Harriet Shelley and Fanny Imlay, the deaths of Mary’s children Clare in 1818 and William in 1819, coming so close together must have had for her the weight of a curse. This story of 1820 seems to say that in a family where only forbidden affections can thrive it is better that all life cease. Read alongside Frankenstein, it also confirms Jay ...”

“... the general consensus in the early days was that television and politics didn’t mix. Thus Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC in the late Forties, believed that television was totally unsuited to political discussion. The ‘Fourteen Day Rule’, under which no subject likely to be debated in the Commons within the next fortnight could be ...”

“... Attorney’s office, and the fortuitous presence of the Canadian intelligence co-ordinator Sir William Stephenson, Gouzenko might have shared the wretched fate of his ambassador, bundled onto a Soviet freighter in New York for home, and the mercies of the KGB. The pattern didn’t change until the Sixties, when we began to breed our own moles. Mr ...”

“... and the spoonerism. So I read a book about Spooner, published by W.H. Allen in 1977, by Sir William Hayter, Warden of New College, Oxford 1958-1976. Throughout the book he describes the spoonerism as ‘metaphasis’, a word which is not in the OED. The correct word is ‘metathesis’. He must have misheard it at High Table. This error is repeated in ...”

“... caused an outburst of public indignation in Britain. When it emerged that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had authorised the opening of Mazzini’s correspondence, he was attacked in Parliament for resorting to ‘the spy system of foreign states’ and Carlyle wrote to the Times that opening of men’s letters was ‘a practice near of kin to picking ...”

“... struggle under the oil slick of the Gulf, in a picture grislier than – but indebted to – William Carlos Williams’s poem of 1930s class struggle ‘The Yachts’. And then Rich addresses herself: From shores of sickness you lie out on listless waters with no boundaries  floodplain without horizon dun skies mirroring its opaque face and nothing not ...”

“... figure of Chatterjee’s book. In June 1756, Siraj laid siege to the British garrison at Fort William in Calcutta. The governor and many of the soldiers fled by boat. When those who remained surrendered, they were put in a small (or large) room, where, by the next morning, some (or many) had died of exhaustion, dehydration, asphyxiation or through ...”

“... attitudes towards Jews of so many anti-alienists and fictional characters (the narrator in James Blyth’s Ichabod, for instance), Glover strongly reinforces Cheyette’s ambivalence thesis. Did liberal England die with the passing of the Aliens Act? Novels by Edgar Wallace and Violet Guttenberg – The Four Just Men (1905) and A Modern Exodus ...”

“... who ‘much later … compelled me to try and draw better’). Thankfully, Burne-Jones also had William Morris, his friend from university. They had chosen the cause of art together, and Morris was to barrel their joint enterprise along for the next forty years or so. Burne-Jones’s earliest works, done in the late 1850s, were in pen-and-ink, one of ...”

“... circle round the National Review. That conservatism would not exist but for the dramatic wit of William Buckley, a wit which has choreographed into a not too discordant and blundering ballet a motley cast of themes and characters. Wills’s lively account, in his autobiographical Confessions of a Conservative (1979), of the conflicts in a group that has ...”

“... and it is in fact disputed by the editor of this volume. Donat Gallagher teaches English at the James Cook University of North Queensland; his case for a ‘complete’ collection of Waugh’s essays and articles rests on his subject’s ‘exceptional talent as a writer, and vigour and independence as a thinker’. These qualities Waugh certainly had in ...”

“... Chronicle, the Annual Register and two West Country newspapers, with an occasional glance at James Fenimore Cooper’s history of the US Navy. The craft involved range from men-of-war and merchantmen to schooners, jollyboats and even small pleasure-craft, the capsizing of which would not normally count as shipwrecks. The author is not concerned with the ...”

“... the transgression of conventional ideas of beauty and decorum. This point was well made by James Northcote in a conversation reported by William Hazlitt about Il Giorno, Correggio’s altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with Saint Jerome and Mary Magdalene in Parma – a painting which was then so celebrated that all ...”