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“... of The Mystic Masseur. The urge to decorate at least doesn’t die. Many of the Penguin covers David Gentleman did, including those for the New Penguin Shakespeare, are wood engravings. The sharp, definite lines, a characteristic of the medium, suits their small scale. The style of some more recent Penguin series – the Gothic Horrors covers by ...”

“... a sizeable proportion of the detailed evidence we have about him dates from May and June 1593. For David Riggs, coming to the subject of Marlowe after writing Ben Jonson: A Life (1989), the paucity of material must have been fairly dismaying. The long-lived Jonson went out of his way to make things easy for biographers, leaving an extensive paper trail ...”

“... David Peterley’s Peterley Harvest was first published on 24 October 1960. The book had a curious history and, shortly before publication, stories began to appear in the press declaring it to be an elaborate hoax. The jacket of the book contained the information that David Peterley was the only son of an old Quaker family that had ‘lived in the Chilterns and been neighbours of Milton and the Penns ...”

“... identical chestnut-coloured corduroy suits with matching hats, acquiring the nickname of ‘velvet gentleman’ from his friends. A couple of months later he was broke again. In 1897 he managed to finish a piece, the sixth Gnossienne (from gnostic? Knossos?), a series of piano pieces he’d started in 1889. It’s perhaps the most alien of the set, jerky and ...”

“... at the Assembly Rooms in George Street) a ‘Highland Ball’ and warned all citizens that ‘no Gentleman is to be allowed to appear in any thing but the ancient Highland costume’ – ‘this noblest of all British costumes’. George himself turned up in a field-marshal’s coat and blue pantaloons, plus the riding boots he had worn at a military parade ...”

“... have been kept at home, but every man carried a knife with which to cut his food, and every gentleman a sword. Fights were common, but the law required you, if attacked, to retreat until your back was against the wall: only then could you kill with impunity. After 1604 one particular weapon was singled out as especially in need of control: the Stabbing ...”

“... This contemporary description indirectly acknowledges Turpin’s status as a self-defined gentleman (his father was a butcher), for gentlemen took horse, while the poor walked. For weeks, Turpin had been ‘eating, drinking and carousing’, ‘joking, drinking and telling stories’ with an unending stream of visitors to the York jail: his jailer had ...”

“... Bible into Chinese. (‘He boned up feverishly on Manchu,’ enthuses his other biographer, David Williams, in his schoolboyish way.) Borrow had to argue in Russian with the Tsar’s board of censors, hire and supervise ill-educated Estonian compositors to set up Mongolian print (which, he said, ‘differs little from the Mandchou’) and prepare to ...”

“... that ‘he would go to the stake for his opinions but would go courteously raising his hat’; David Garnett found him ‘rather rigid with good intentions’; others said that he never saw a joke and could not bear to lose at croquet. The generous impulses were certainly there, but tended to take predictable forms: faced with suffering, he reached for his ...”

“... on to recommend and support the madness of the Lords’ rejection of the Budget. Like Mr Mackay, David Dutton has lumbered his book with a subtitle: ‘Gentleman in Politics’. Austen Chamberlain was certainly in politics and probably a gentleman. But it is not clear whether ‘a ...”

“... pinstripes on the government benches rose like a lot of Pavlov’s dogs. ‘Will the honourable gentleman give way?’ Fred ploughed on. The cries of ‘give way’ intensified. He looked around, his eyes alighting upon Jason Joslin – J.J. to his friends – a smug young man of modest origins who had, by fair means or foul, clawed his way to considerable ...”

“... of all, whether in her victories she were becoming blatant.’ The blatancy of jingoism tells the gentleman how he differs, how he is. The gentleman sacrifices himself, the jingo cheers from a safe distance. The gentleman plays the game, the bounder watches other people play. ‘That’s ...”

“... father had stood up in a Dublin court to defend his right as an actor-manager to call himself a gentleman; Sheridan himself had suffered for his theatrical origins at Harrow. Now aspiring to become a figure in society, ‘he was living proof that gentility was no longer an obvious and unquestionable quality’ – but ‘like all uncertain things, it needed ...”

“... flourished for two centuries, finally closing in 1859. Vauxhall’s special status, Alan Borg and David Coke argue in this hefty antiquarian tome, lies in its originality as a commercial venture, the changes it triggered in the social and cultural life of London, the extreme heterogeneity of the mingling crowds, the mass audience the gardens gave to modern ...”

“... that its ‘accidental occasion’ is the apparitions that appeared before death to a respectable gentleman: apparitions of devils fishing for souls, of carousing sailors, of Lucifer, of ‘an inveigling troupe of naked virgins’, who ‘to the end their natural unshelled shining mother-of-pearl proportions might be more imprintingly apprehended … made ...”