“... life is going smoothly, but they can take a lot out of you if you aren’t feeling quite up to the mark. Harriet was involved in a protracted and painful divorce from her third husband, a rich man who had craftily gone to an aggressive young woman solicitor while Harriet was stuck with the stuffy old family firm, so that it looked as if she would emerge from ...”

“... genius. That would be the popular deduction – not surprisingly when the doyen of inductivism, Francis Bacon, could refer even to his own contribution as a ‘birth of time rather than wit’. To his credit, Merton had the wit to see the danger of a false disjunction. ‘For more than three centuries,’ he complained, ‘there has been an intermittent ...”

“... of men of colour calling themselves the people of the Mosquito Shore’. Their petitions hit the mark. When Lord Sydney took the matter up with Despard, he expressed his doubts about whether ‘free negroes, however valuable in point of character’ should be ‘considered upon an equal footing with people of a different complexion’. Despard was surprised ...”

“... deliberately husbanding his creative energy for writing poetry (‘composing’ comes nearer the mark, since even after a poem had been completed in his head, he was as reluctant to put it down on paper as he was to write a letter). The title of this edition is slightly misleading, for it actually contains letters and associative documents by, to or about ...”

“... serve is taken reverentially for granted. Like their predecessors, these volumes also retain the mark of Namier’s peculiar genius. His interest in psychoanalysis explains why we are told how many MPs were formally insane in each Parliament (there were at least twenty such between 1790 and 1820). His belief that the House of Commons was uniquely a ...”

“... Sophia chastising her son William for being ‘a true trifling character’, emigrant Anne Francis on the ants and jackals greeting colonists in South Africa, Fanny Burney on her mastectomy, two reports of witnessing executions and five different accounts of hot-air balloon voyages. There is John Addington Symonds’s description of Tennyson and ...”

“... that matter?), Margaret (of Anjou) as Margareth, and so on. To be translated more than once is the mark of a classic, and automatically makes one wonder how this one is faring after 78 years. How enduring the appeal of its subject-matter remains can be gauged from the chapter-titles: ‘The Passionate Intensity of Life’ (an echo of Yeats, replacing ...”

“... aristocrats and radicals. Jane Austen, for instance, enjoys no more prominence than her brothers Francis and Charles, both officers in the navy. While Uglow devotes considerable attention to campaigns on sea and land, her primary concern is the rhythm of life on the home front during twenty years of war. The wars became like the vicissitudes of British ...”

“... theory of revolution as a return to the founding contract of society, to one in which, as Mark Philp pointed out in his superb short book on Paine (1989), revolution is represented as a new stage of social organisation made necessary by social, economic and intellectual progress. There is little sign over the course of the book that Hitchens has paid ...”

“... Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon. Would this mark the end of my long connection with Jamaica? Stuart left the island in 1951, making a different kind of journey from the one undertaken by those who disembarked from the Windrush in search of work and a new life. Jamaica had been taken by the British in 1655 ...”

“... for discussion in this field has changed over the past twenty-five years. Yet the point they mark in the development of the subject is not a total revolution: it is a sort of historiographical 1654, a mood in which the interesting question is seen to be, not whether the new approaches are valid, but how much of the old may be seen to have survived their ...”

“... conceptions of modern science and technology, and hence part of this history. In the 17th century, Francis Bacon pioneered the notions of knowledge as an underground seam or deposit, and of research as an assault on ‘nature’s womb’ in order to uncover its secrets. In Bacon’s New Atlantis, the sages of Solomon’s House boast of the artificial caves, up ...”

“... up and down for another hour, talking of Michael Datta, Bengal’s greatest poet. I mentioned Francis Thompson. Rabi said he couldn’t always understand him. I said: ‘I think sometimes he would have difficulty in understanding himself.’ I remarked that there was much more of a literary tradition out here than in England. ‘Do you think so, Mr ...”

“... who enjoyed a fortuitous éclat as ‘Blackwood’s celebrated Odontist’. If ‘like is an ill mark,’ as a character in the Confessions suggests, it was a mark at which the Blackwood’s group delightedly took aim. But Miller’s ‘likeness’ also has the force of a disclaimer, a warning that some of the things we ...”

“... to the Spanish during the defence of Leiden in 1574. Next, Gascoigne sought to make his mark in the world and at Court by writing. In 1575 he composed an entertainment for the Queen on her visit to Kenilworth. What should have been his finest hour became a debacle: in his eagerness to please his patron the Earl of Leicester, who was paying for the ...”