“... and tried to keep the Pacific as a private lake. Only a few years before this the terrible Henry Morgan, whose exploits and enormous plunder make Kidd’s dwindle into insignificance, had been knighted and made lieutenant-governor of Jamaica. The buccaneers came from all the maritime nations and the mixed crew often agreed very well: but in 1689 William III ...”

“... transfigure reality, not to reflect it – which is why, from the heretical medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and ...”

“... have kept all right so far this winter, but won’t brag.’ Three days later, in a note thanking John Middleton Murry for a presentation copy of one of his books, comes a sudden flash of intimacy almost painful in its nakedness: ‘I feel a sad sense of shortcoming at your good opinion of my writings & myself. I fear you do not know what a feeble person I ...”

“... three hundred years ago. After studying London hospital records covering nearly a century, Dr John Arbuthnot concluded that, in every year, more boys had been born than girls; each year on record was a ‘male year’. Why was this? We can imagine a mad style of reductionist explanation, accessible only to a prurient deity: describe the physical and ...”

“... scarcely a word of it; the wholly other and the all-too-human; the virgin ascetic who accused John Locke of trying to ‘embroil’ him with women, and the supreme London boulevardier whose consuming passions included Château Haut-Brion, the theatre and serial embroilments with women. Turn the page and the odd couple is joined by a third, for here ...”

“... as the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR): in effect, the Ministry for John Prescott, whose amour-propre demands a duly sprawling apanage. Mullin goes to Fenwick’s at his wife’s insistence, and buys three new suits. Early in 2001 he moves to International Development, only to get the heave-ho after Labour’s election win that ...”

“... stones. The anxiety present on every page is: would the paradox succeed? The reputation of Tom and Morgan is higher than her own? Brief despair – will she always be an outsider? Certainly Eliot and Forster had inner and outer selves, a persona which pretended, and an inner art which made life, made interest. And in October 1938 she is lamenting the fact that ...”

“... city sun. When my father felt depressed, he would visit the print room and look at a Dürer. The Morgan Library, the New York Academy of Medicine and Columbia’s rare book collections served those with more specialised needs.New York couldn’t compete with London or Paris: it had no bouquinistes, no Farringdon Road, no British Library or Bibliothèque ...”

“... Private Gardens of London. Written by a landscape gardener, and beautifully photographed by John Miller, the book’s focus is a series of nearly forty gardens from different parts of the metropolis. The Museum of London’s scheme to collect pictures and photographs of London gardens will surely result in a more representative sample, but this is a ...”

“... manual forty years later.’ There are occasional cross words – a fairly dignified row with John Lehmann and some bickering with Kingsley Martin. All this is more interesting than the political letters, at any rate as they are here represented, though there remains much to be said for Woolf’s ‘peculiar’ socialism, which was ...”

“... national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed to be the most vilified vested interest in the country. But from mid-century, unimagined national prosperity, assisted by Peelite finance, changed ...”

“... and rewarding job. He gravitated gently to Sydney, Australia, where he became a friend of the Rev. John McKnight, a rector in a slum area. Under McKnight’s influence, he moved towards Christian ideas. He liked the way McKnight applied his religion to the real world, and shared the rector’s horror of nuclear weapons. ‘Christians,’ said ...”

“... conspicuous failure as a writer is her lesbian novel, first published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan as The Price of Salt in 1952, then reprinted in 1991 under Highsmith’s own name as Carol. The cause of this failure is, paradoxically, that the novel comes too close to Highsmith’s real-life traumas and concerns: as long as she was compelled to ...”

“... display a collection of Limoges enamels acquired from the estate of another rival collector, J.P. Morgan, who had died in 1913. Vertical display cases were duly built and the room transformed into a cabinet, with some enamels laid out on tables and dressoirs. Many American collectors of the Gilded Age sought to recreate an Italian Renaissance studiolo, but ...”

“... acutely aware of their linguistic distinctiveness, signalled in the first edition of the Rev. John Jamieson’s influential Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published in 1808-09. Carlyle, the sage of Craigenputtock, had not stayed there, but in literary London he retained and exploited his outsider’s sense of his own alien speech and ...”