“... two decades after the poem was published, during a dinner party, Hecht’s best friend, William MacDonald, mentioned that the Dacian wars had lasted only two or three years, not fifteen. Hecht was shocked, and spent the entire night searching for his source, only to find it completely mistaken. He was angry with himself but furious that MacDonald ...”

“... advertise and illuminate other writers and artists. Peter Marshall does so in his new biography, William Godwin. Hazlitt’s vivid account of Godwin’s political importance appears on the first page of Marshall’s introduction, and his worthy book is studded with variations on ‘as Hazlitt rightly observed’. He accepts Hazlitt’s judgments as ...”

“... but he had none of the poise and magnificence that were supposed to go with a royal pedigree. William, Prince of Orange was a mousy, middle-aged sociophobe, famous for combining blatant adultery and sanctimonious piety, and loved by no one except, maybe, his docile wife, Mary. But he was a skilful practitioner of the political arts, and over a period of ...”

“... time come round for a genuine narrative dénouement. Pragmatism – good old American pragmatism, James and Dewey style – is the looked-for issue out of all philosophical perplexities. The pragmatist has no use for truth-claims, unless by defining them provisionally in terms of ‘warranted assertability’. Truth is simply, as ...”

“... in a corporate society. At Harvard, he was, at different times, an assistant and acolyte to William James and George Santayana, and he came to believe that reality was something one had to fight for, that personality and expertise had their parts to play, and that ‘psychology mattered in politics.’ He wanted to see what the papers were saying ...”

“... as Francis Terry Leak, who ‘usually discussed slavery as a racial matter’. Or the Reverend William A. Smith, who defended slavery on ‘racial grounds’. Or the Reverend James Warley Miles, who also ‘preferred racial to class grounds’. In a chapter on the political economy of the Old South the authors note that ...”

“... rainfall across the country varied from year to year, because nobody was keeping count. George James Symons, one of those energetic Victorians who combined the erudition of a scholar with the organisational abilities of a manager and the enthusiasm of an amateur collector, realised what was needed and put it in place: a countrywide network of volunteer ...”

“... or social oppression, but it has been the subject of numerous novels. One of the greatest is by William Faulkner, who created the sin-bearing pariah Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932). Among other malign habits, Joe uses his ambiguous skin colour to sleep with prostitutes without paying. ‘One night it did not work. He rose from the bed and told the ...”

“... us think otherwise. Her evidence covers a wide range, from Plato and Aristotle to Proust and Henry James, and though she takes a critical interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy. These philosophers and novelists expand ...”

“... the maiden’s cheek, and fell upon the faded chintz. You guessed it. Who could it be but Henry James? There would be no shame in your not recognising this as James’s work, however: it has languished in peaceful obscurity for more than 140 years, only now to have its authorship revealed by Floyd Horowitz, recently ...”

“... Frank Budgen’s last pamphlet ‘Further Recollections of James Joyce’ (1955) carries a bit of personal reminiscence which looks as if it might be more important than most. He remembers that he had one day remarked to Joyce that he could never understand why Bloom, in Ulysses, lets his wife commit adultery with Boylan; but we gather that after this leading question he offered his own answer, hoping it would irritate the great man into a correction, which shows he understood interviewers’ technique ...”

“... Exclusion Crisis of 1679, the attempt to exclude Charles II’s Roman Catholic heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, from the throne. In the political dramas of the 1680s the Russell dynasty produced two of the iconic figures of English Whig mythology: the Whig martyr William, Lord Russell, and one of the Immortal Seven ...”

“... of the many Scottish Whigs like Holland’s librarian John Allen, or the historian Sir James Mackintosh, who were drawn into the circle, are left unanalysed. When he writes of ‘Holland House’ thinking this or disapproving of that, he mostly seems to mean Lord and Lady Holland. The book is essentially an exploration of their outlook, and ...”

“... To write well about William Blake you need to be enthusiastic, aphoristic and contrary. It also helps to be slightly mad. You need to begin your book with a paragraph like this: When Blake spoke the first word of the 19th century there was no one to hear it, and now that his message, the message of emancipation from reality through the ‘shaping spirit of imagination’, has penetrated the world, and is slowly remaking it, few are conscious of the first utterer, in modern times, of the message with which all are familiar ...”

“... where it has not been evasive. While the Dutch, in whose annals the annexation of Britain by William of Orange is a less momentous occurrence, have been celebrating it without inhibition, the response of the Mother of Parliaments was to provide a poky exhibition in the Banqueting House which was taken off before the anniversary of ...”