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“... on the mob in the Gordon Riots, had another claim to notice. As a sheriff of London, Sir Barnard Turner was instrumental in abolishing Tyburn as a place of execution. In so doing he ended the tumultuous turnout of ruffians, whores and honest citizens who cheered, or execrated, the deathcart on its way from Newgate along Tyburn Road, now Oxford Street, to the ...”

“... Rain, Steam and Speed’ (1844) J.M.W. Turner’s​  Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway hangs in a corner of Room 34 at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. The painting remains close to where it was first exhibited in 1844 when the Royal Academy occupied the gallery’s east wing. ‘There comes a train down upon you,’ Thackeray wrote after seeing the painting ...”

“... is well represented, but 21 of the 26 references against his name relate to works by the unindexed George F. Woodberry (another English humorist, D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, has his entries indexed under Percy Wyndham Lewis). The genuine Wodehouse entries are not really vintage, which may well be the result of trying to find unhackneyed passages. Indeed, the search ...”

“... water trying to dodge the hail of bullets. ‘I knew too much,’ admits the author, who had read George Otto Trevelyan’s Cawnpore. (‘What ensues,’ wrote George Otto at one point, ‘an Englishman would willingly tell in phrases not his own,’ and quoted instead the words of ‘a native spy’. Quelle ...”

“... was not some kind of brutal reductionism, any more than Marx’s was. On the contrary, as Denys Turner points out in this superb study, he understood that ‘there is a lot more to matter itself than meets the eye of today’s average materialist.’ His criticism of the materialists with whom he was acquainted was not that they were bad on the subject of ...”

“... of those who bought their rank from James I, or of war profiteers who wrote fat cheques to Lloyd George. Keeping faith with the hereditary principle has not always been easy. We are treated to a whole chapter about a peer who owed his seat in the Lords to being the product of a virgin birth, which might be thought the highest qualification of all. This is ...”

“... for a career. As a dispenser of life’s prizes William hardly compared with his elder brother George, who was chairman of the East India Company and a Member of Parliament for the City of London, and who could steer a man towards a governorship of a province worth as much as many a bishopric. Lyall’s clients seem not to have entered holy orders from any ...”

“... be turned into facts. We should so learn them that words may become deeds. In Philology James Turner attempts a heroic defence of this misunderstood breed. He argues that philology lies at the heart of all the academic disciplines currently called ‘humanities’. He suggests that subjects as apparently diverse as ...”

“... more famous names, whether of arbiters or exemplars, would have been welcome in these pages. To George IV is attributed a stinging judgment on Sir Robert Peel: ‘He is no gentleman. He divides his coat tails when he sits down.’ A letter by Scott Fitzgerald is printed as a charming example of how to coax a 19-year-old daughter into saying thank-you for ...”

“... of the contributors do, however, engage Kermode’s thought in a fairly serious way: John Stokes, George Hunter and Patrick Parrinder. Two ways of doing so were possible. Either Kermode’s general view of the critic’s task or his ideas concerning specific texts or groups of texts could have been the focus of attention. Stokes and Hunter choose the second ...”

“... fed horseshoes. The Tower guidebooks of the 1750s blamed this nonsense on the Dutch, yet when George III received an ostrich in 1791 the Tower staff jumped at the chance to try out an iron diet on it. A post-mortem found more than eighty undigested nails in its body. Is this misapprehension now extinct? Not in the works of P.G. Wodehouse: ‘He gazed at ...”

“... all of its fleshly temptations and attendant despairs, is an obvious incitement to grace; thus, George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, and Rock Against Racism, and Live Aid, and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can ...”

“... Wetmore Story in Rome, a handsome apartment in the Palazzo Barberini, she met people who had known George Eliot, Thackeray, the Brownings. This, even at the age of 12, was a world where she felt instantly at home. Among the many details uncovered by Colby, it is intriguing to learn that another of Paget’s surrogate mothers was Cornelia Boinville de Chastel ...”

“... in a diverting roll-call of ‘Great Men of Weather’ the first British television weatherman, George Cowling. ‘He set off at 5 a.m. every morning from the Air Ministry to the Shepherd’s Bush studio of the BBC with his meteorological chart for the day; on top of his Civil Service salary he received an appearance fee of ten shillings.’ Cowling was in ...”

“... in the best tradition of Buffalo Bill. Earlier volumes of the DNB tell of disreputable divines in George Ill’s time who abandoned parish work to conduct scandal-sheets in Grub Street. How different the motivation of the Rev Marcus Moms, who left his Lancashire parish to start up that healthy paper for boys, Eagle. Some years later, he launched the less ...”