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“... that the problem with Emma Hamilton is knowing quite how to take her. Near the end of her book, Flora Fraser quotes a startlingly vivid account of Emma’s behaviour just after receiving news of Nelson’s death: it was, an eye-witness concluded, ‘a very serio-comic performance’. Is Emma’s story a tragedy or a comedy? Certainly it begins ...”

“... gin went round. By and by supper came, when there appeared [Allan’s] spouse, the celebrated Miss Flora. She was a little woman, of a mild and genteel appearance, mighty soft and well-bred.’ What had he expected? The age of operatic heroines, loudly sacrificing all for love or liberty, had scarcely begun. But Boswell may have hoped for a more dramatic ...”

“... forgetting what it is like to be a child, though the occasional exceptions – Dickens, Orwell and Flora Thompson – sketch in the outline of this vast unexplored continent. Perhaps this is one reason why historians have so rarely written about childhood. And even if they do write about it – when discussing the history of education, for example – they ...”

“... slightly sardonic timbre’, which seems a fair description of his everyday tones, and so is G.S. Fraser’s – ‘an odd, sad, snarly voice’. Of his poetry reading John Wain said he rendered some passages ‘like a Neapolitan stevedore, laryngitically croaking others’. In private sitting-rooms he used a quieter tone, ‘though the curious angularity of ...”

“... they made a brave show in resisting the loss of all but one of the American colonies. Led by Simon Fraser of Lovat, who co-operated with the Hanoverian government and so regained his father’s lands, the chiefs raised and officered a disproportionately large part of the British Army, and if it was a part given to mutiny, this came from the refusal of the high ...”