“... by 1787 when Burns appeared in Edinburgh under the sponsorship of the gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt. A poet found himself in a city of prose. He came from ‘the ploughtail’, said R. L. Stevenson, ‘to an academy of gilt unbelief and artificial letters’. Mr Royle does not neglect Burns’s social embarrassment in Edinburgh, but he goes no further than ...”

“... purpose might be best advanced. By the time he set off for Wales and Ireland, he had abandoned the hunt. Throughout the letters, however, he seems keen to draw attention to his delight in female company, archly alluding to a brief liaison with the famous singer Henriette Sontag, and, mysteriously, to a nude painted by Titian which comes to life for his benefit ...”

“... It does not seem to have occurred to the Crown, when it prosecuted More or Wyatt or Surrey, to hunt for treason in their works of imaginative literature. Starkey, far from seeking to conceal the content of his Dialogue or anticipating royal wrath, planned to present it to Henry and to invite him to implement its proposals. There were, it is true, decencies ...”

“... remained important to him (with Alfred and Emily Tennyson, and with the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt, whom he would call ‘daddy’). Lear’s travel journals and letters are full of observations that could have made it into nonsense poems: hedges ‘absolutely pink’, rocks like ‘gruyere ...”

“... North Vietnamese were ‘reacting defensively’. Nonetheless, Johnson personally lied to Senator William Fulbright, the highly respected chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in order to get him to sponsor the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Congress. Ellsberg took all this calmly. He accepted Johnson’s campaign slogan for the 1964 Presidential ...”

“... had some successes in providing clues that helped identify such spies as the Admiralty clerk William John Vassall; Georges Paques, a French officer in Nato; and Hugh Hambleton, a Canadian professor. But although he insisted that there must be moles in the CIA, he never found one. Instead, over the years, his list of suspects in the West became more and ...”

“... then, another biography? Joan Hardwick, author of An Immodest Violet (1990), a study of Violet Hunt (whose novels included – yes – The Tiger Skin), evidently felt irresistibly drawn to another immodest adventuress of the period. She is a writer who can keep a straight face when trafficking in absurdity, though she throws in an occasional exclamation ...”

“... journalism: and there is an inexhaustible flow of brilliant description. Hazlitt, Lamb, Leigh Hunt – one or another is bound to be in the audience. Besides, the solid diarists like Henry Crabb Robinson or Farington will have made an entry: if all else fails, Fanny Burney will have been told what went on at a first night by someone less squeamish in the ...”

“... world. But no one, not even Her Majesty, seems to know the true extent of her fortune. (As Bunker Hunt, the one-time Texas billionaire, once observed, anyone who knows how much they are worth cannot be worth very much.) Estimates range from £100 million, which is scarcely serious riches at all, to more than £3000 million, which is truly a mind-boggling ...”

“... 1980s, the US Coastguard trained pigeons to recognise people lost at sea as part of Project Sea Hunt. The birds were placed in observation bubbles mounted on the bottom of helicopters and trained to peck at buttons when they spotted a scrap of coloured fabric floating in the sea. Pigeons were able to find the fabric 93 per cent of the time. Human subjects ...”

“... their barbarian husbands to Christianity are yet more situational constructs to be unpacked). William Chester Jordan has written a general survey of Europe in the ‘high’ or ‘central’ Middle Ages, often taken to constitute the Middle Ages. If this period is likely to seem less dark, more familiar to general readers than Geary’s ...”

“... of the Other Woman’). When the New Yorker writer Lillian Ross embarked on a relationship with William Shawn, the magazine’s married editor, she couldn’t even bear to call it ‘having an affair’, never mind ‘mistressdom’. In Ross’s view, a mistress was ‘a heavily mascaraed woman in a corny movie, wearing a negligee and sitting around sulking ...”

“... life to come in the English countryside, her formal enrolment in the world of the squirearchy, the hunt-to-hunt, the point-to-point, the open garden scheme, the charity fête. During the war, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had worn them to review the Girl Guides and launch messenger pigeons. Ilia knew none of this ...”

“... act of sacrifice saved neither himself nor his children from persecution and discrimination. William Hinton’s Shenfan continues his remarkable account of a Chinese village, Long Bow, in Shansi Province, which he began in Fanshen, where he covered the period of the land reform movement. A practical agriculturalist and academic, Hinton had spent five ...”

“... venomous and virulent, as well as being frequently obscene and licentious. The reigns of William III and Queen Anne were marked by intense political partisanship, and the language used in attacks on government and parliament provoked retaliation. The Stamp Duty Act of that year caused Swift to lament ‘that all Grub Street is ruined.’ This was an ...”