“... yawning fissures left by Sassoon and Owen and Graves. But from the Laureate none was forthcoming. Robert Bridges was too aggressively uncommitted, and perhaps too honest a poet, to do the right thing. (When he went to the Palace in 1913 to receive the office he snapped at Lord Stamfordham, who was in attendance, ‘I don’t want any of your Stars and ...”

“... Not long ago I, too, was browsing in the Huntingdon files and found a large box of letters from Robert Conquest to Amis; the other side of the correspondence was missing, and what was there contained lots of limericks and few confessional items for the use of any future biographer of Conquest, possibly Salwak. It seemed somehow a slightly dingy way of ...”

“... of a settled home with Elsa. All in all, they felt, ‘certainly it would be better to die young.’ Their sole comfort was their love for each other, something which they had learned to keep well-hidden. Accompanied by baby Joan, who was screaming ‘like the servantless children of the poor’, Elsa returned from Egypt and moved the boys with her ...”

“... the Moon (1894), does not, as popular belief has it, depict John and Salome, but ‘Narraboth, the young Syrian’, who ‘loves Salome and kills himself out of jealousy; and his homosexual admirer, the Page of Herodias ... who urges Narraboth to look at the moon’ – the face of Wilde – ‘rather than at Salome’. She underscores the sexual ambiguity ...”

“... Petar Zivkovic, pushed open the thick oak door of Belgrade’s Royal Palace to let in dozens of young Serbian officers. They swarmed into the courtyard to be confronted by members of the palace guard still loyal to King Aleksander and Queen Draga. After fierce fighting which left several dead, and with fire spreading through the building, the plotters ...”

“... the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon by the structural engineer Anthony Hunt and the young Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, who were then part of Team 4; and the first hyperbolic paraboloid roof in Britain, created in 1957 by Robert Townsend for the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Townsend’s own house in the ...”

“... it were to be wished of all wise men and Her Majesty’s good subjects,’ he wrote to Robert Dudley, ‘that one of these two queens of the isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man, to make so happy a marriage, as thereby there might be a unity of the whole isle.’ Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots by François Clouet ...”

“... which set the vanished child above reproach. Cry as you will, take what you need, the night is young and limitless our greed. Where does Prynne come from? The question is not one of origin or influence but of approach. It is important to insist – in advance of the predictable accusations of élitism, difficulty and so on – that there are many ...”

“... national contexts at all, and misses some of the best French material altogether (such as Robert Martin Lesuire’s corrosively funny 1760 novel Les Sauvages de l’Europe, a virtual catalogue of anti-English stereotypes). And without contextualisation, the observers, like the observed, blend together into a homogeneous mass. This problem undermines ...”

“... of the barbed wire spring holds full sway,’ Mary Berg wrote in 1941. ‘From my window I can see young girls with bouquets of lilac walking on the “Aryan” part of the street. I can even smell the tender fragrance of the opened buds. But there is no sign of spring in the ghetto. Here the rays of the sun are swallowed up by the heavy grey pavement.’ The ...”

“... of the gendering of fantasies of remote control. In an 1892 article on female circumcision, Dr Robert Morris declared that ‘the clitoris is a little electric button which, pressed by adhesions, rings up the whole nervous system.’ Dr Morris’s intervention provoked some panicky speculation as to the way that amount of pleasure might be brought speedily ...”

“... finds his father again in strange circumstances. The scene was once famous, at that high noon when Robert Louis Stevenson thought Meredith second only to Shakespeare. Roy has become a sort of court jester for a German margravine and – to cut a long story short – has agreed to pose as a newly erected equestrian statue in bronze, so that she can win a ...”

“... liability’ offences, and efforts (often highly controversial) to tame and civilise recalcitrant young offenders. Progressive ideas about poverty, which from the 1900s to the Fifties circled around the issues of mental deficiency and biological-cum-cultural heredity, have swung dramatically in the direction indicated by Wootton – towards seeing poverty ...”

“... of adulthood, she soon starts to wreak havoc. She engages herself to Archibald McCandless, a young medical colleague of Godwin’s (the novel is actually written in the form of McCandless’s memoirs, heavily annotated by Gray), but, hungry for experience, chooses first of all to elope with an unscrupulous solicitor, and leads him a merry, financially ...”

“... are] cowards, loungers, without majesty, without awe, antiquity, foresight, character; old bucks, young bucks, and Biddy Buckskins. He runs on colloquially, ‘talking’ warmly and unselfconsciously. If only his friends could do the same. Since Bridges destroyed his own letters to Hopkins, the new material in this edition – the letters back to Hopkins from ...”