“... she wanted to play the game in 1849 on a visit to Mansfield to meet the family of her new fiancé, James Collinson. By now, at the age of nineteen, her poems had been accepted in the national press, and after the despair that her father’s illness had cast on the whole household, she was enjoying again the audacious conversation and artistic ambition of the ...”

“... common law and subject to its constraints. It was so when Elizabeth I’s autocratic successor, James I and VI, wanted to rule by proclamation; it was so in 2010 when Theresa May wanted to use the royal prerogative to bypass Parliament; it was still so in 2017 when it was proposed that the UK leave the EU by ministerial fiat rather than parliamentary ...”

“... Theory of the Gimmick concludes, boldly and brilliantly, with a meticulous analysis of Henry James’s late fiction. Ngai has noticed that the investigations of opaque social and moral circumstance conducted in these novels and stories have the effect of exposing an over-reliance, in times of emergency, on waged and unwaged care-providers ...”

“... church.Many puritans were young, rejecting convention and seeking an identity. The Hebrew scholar Henry Ainsworth spent his early twenties drifting from Norfolk to London to Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert Browne, who in the 1580s lent his name to Ainsworth’s brethren ...”

“... Stumbling​ out of the pouring rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands gin went round ...”

“... media, individuals who encountered him at one point or another, and Ugandan public figures such as Henry Kyemba, who spun tales of Amin as a cannibal and killer, including of his own wives and children. David Owen, foreign secretary under James Callaghan, compared him to Pol Pot; he also looked into the possibility of having ...”

“... what remained of its North American possessions: in the 1840s Toronto tripled in size). As James Belich showed in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (2009), more British investment went to the Australian colonies in the 1870s and 1880s than anywhere else in the world. In 1835, Melbourne had no permanent ...”

“... was given an uncharacteristically blunt expression in a public statement by Secretary of State James Baker, vouchsafing the telephone number of the White House and telling the Israelis to call when they were serious about peace. Something resembling a peace initiative was launched by the Israeli Government prior to Shamir’s visit to Washington in May ...”

“... Yet Charles gave a free hand to an archbishop seemingly bent on destroying the supremacy which Henry VIII had won for the Crown. Puritans were bound to ask whether Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s power so deeply that ...”

“... provided the impetus, addressing meetings of mayors and industrialists to whip up enthusiasm while Henry Cole got on with the practicalities of presenting what the prince envisaged as a ‘living encyclopedia’ of international production. The resulting display in the Crystal Palace was a kind of Benthamite panopticon, a rational arrangement of all of human ...”

“... in this volume (especially by current or former Labour politicians, including both Milibands, James Purnell, Hazel Blears, Jon Cruddas) is just the usual political blah-blah: Labour has to learn to admit its mistakes without diminishing its achievements, it has to find a new narrative to explain its vision for Britain, it has to harness the leadership ...”

“... fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am no woman. Keep your tires to yourself. Nor am I Pericles Prince of Tyre.’ Indeed, one way to suggest a noisy crowd circa 1609 was to invoke an audience for Pericles: describing a packed ...”

“... is perhaps not entirely absent from Hilliard’s world. The portrait miniature of the young Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, dated 1594, inevitably calls Shakespeare to mind, because in this year his narrative poem Lucrece was published with a dedication to the earl. It is widely argued, though not proved, that Southampton is also the ‘fair ...”

“... worse. In their desperation the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait ...”

“... on the cover, but inside, the anxieties I’ve been talking about are more humanly displayed. Henry Sutton writes about being a ‘Broken-Up Man’. It starts with him crying in front of his seven-year-old daughter: A friend of mine keeps ringing me up to say that being a bloke and getting divorced means I’m on a one-way ticket to a bedsit in ...”