“... were fairly clear, but during the 19th century what it was to be British or English became a far more contested question. This was partly because the rise of manufacturing towns mocked the roast beef and Plymouth Hoe images of the ‘olden time’, but more important was an ambiguity inherent in the country’s ...”

“... towards the sun, exalted and ecstatic, breathing the thin air of the empyrean’. One might, more meanly, say that an important part of their extreme love for each other was the sense it gave them of their great superiority to everyone else. In a life in which what mattered most was to be grand and free and take risks and have adventures and generally be ...”

“... to the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s book, Mr Harris’s costume and make-up probably owed more to stage adaptations of Frankenstein than to the novel itself. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, which opened on 28 July 1823, ran for 37 performances in London, with Mr T.P. Cooke a great success in the role of ...”

“... His other long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was less popular, but it, too, circulated far more widely than any of the plays, appearing in six editions during his life, and in two more by 1640. The most popular of the plays were Richard III and Richard II, each of which went through five editions before 1616. Romeo ...”

“... the punters a bit of history and a bit of literature, and perhaps a bit of gossip, and what’s more it saves them the trouble of reading history. And poems too, for that matter. Not to mention the ordeal of ploughing through a load of literary criticism. But there are two respects in which literary biography is intrinsically pernicious, however well it’s ...”

“... send for them. What money he sent was seized by the older relatives, now avowed enemies of the more gentle second wife and her children, and ready to drive them out. In 1910 they left for the city of Van, where they lived through the massacres of 1915, then perilously escaped Turkey on foot to settle in Yerevan in Russian Armenia. In 1919 his mother ...”

“... sign of diminishing. After all, there’s plenty of scope for innovation. Serial killings are now more common than crimes of passion, while amateur sleuths have largely been replaced by careworn professional detectives. Forensic pathologists are cast as agents of justice; so too are psychological profilers. Tortured, raped and slaughtered women have become ...”

“... In July 1785, Thomas Jefferson, then American Ambassador to France, paid a visit to the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes. Its three-metre-thick walls had previously imprisoned Diderot and the Marquis de Sade. Now, however, it housed the workshop of a gunsmith, Honoré Blanc, and a dozen assistants. As Jefferson watched, Blanc sorted into bins the pieces of 50 musket flintlocks: ‘tumblers, lock plates, frizzens, pans, cocks, sears, bridals, screws and springs ...”

“... researchers. The first thing we hear from him is a phatic murmur delivered into a faulty radio: ‘Thomas? Luke? Come in? This is Doc. Hello, hello. Thomas? Luke? Hello?’ After this, he communicates by non-verbal means – ‘making a face, like: what time do you call this, lads?’ We’re given a few snatches of reported ...”

“... as much as disempowering them, providing a space in which they could speak publicly. Thomas Telford Campbell, the son of the poet Thomas Campbell, impressed the jury with the ‘urbanity, coolness and composure’ of his performance in cross-examining witnesses, and persuaded them to reject the medical ...”

“... of time for all that we want granted’. These particular quibbles are instances of a broader, more intuitive disappointment. Today the first impression of anyone reading (or, very rarely, seeing) Double Falsehood is that little of it sounds much like Shakespeare. An 18th-century audience would perhaps have had lower expectations in this ...”

“... with cancer, one symptom of which is that he is prone to delusions – which may make him an even more proficient fictionaliser than is his counterpart the professional writer. Lured to Israel by the apparition of Roth II, Roth I becomes embroiled in a plot which eventually involves him committing himself to work as an undercover agent for Mossad. Although it ...”

“... those who had supported the King. Some Major-Generals were harsher than others. Royalists breathed more easily under Major-General Whalley in the Midlands, where insurrection was held to be relatively unlikely and where Whalley had respectable local connections and was ready to mollify them, than they did in the North-West under Major-General Worsley, whose ...”

“... sinister villains; one of his early poems is an ironic hymn to Satan. Evil fascinated him a little more than it should. Williams’s writings were all wedded to the central idea that the spiritual world permeates the physical one. In his thrillers, the borderline between the streets of London and the afterlife breaks down: the dead haunt Holborn; in curtained ...”

“... other 19th-century radicals. The accompanying manifesto, signed by Alexander alone, conveyed the more expansive vision of political regeneration captured by his triumphant tour through Europe. The official treaty described the signatory princes as ‘fathers’ to their nations, followed by a rote injunction to duty and obedience among Christian ...”