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“... memoirs, and almost completely messed it up. At one stage an experienced literary agent, George Greenfield, was brought in to advise, but found himself ‘constantly interrupted by Mrs Thatcher . . . who fixed him with a blank, self-absorbed stare. “The extent of her ill-conceived ignorance at that time was only matched by the brazen vigour with ...”

“... on an episode from an 1880 novel, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life, by the American author George Washington Cable. One central character is an enslaved prince, Koanga, who is killed after cursing his enslavers and attempting to escape from them. But Delius and his librettist, Charles Francis Keary, changed Cable’s original in crucial ways, altering ...”

“... Besides this main effort, a squadron of six warships and two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret mission around Cape Horn, attacking Spanish ports on the Pacific coast and capturing one of their famed galleons full of silver en route from Mexico to the Philippines. From the outset, almost everything that could go ...”

“... own interest. Many a man, for instance, will envy Montgomerie’s sonnet to his lawyer: A Baxters bird, a bluiter beggar borne, Ane ill heud huirsone, lyk a barkit hyde, A saulles suinger, seuintie tymes mensuorne, A peltrie pultron poysond vp with pryde ... And a number of the poems have good bits, so that it is possible, by judicious quotation, to make ...”

“... was the first child and eldest daughter of the future fifth earl of Leicester, later an equerry to George VI, and his wife, Elizabeth Yorke, daughter of the eighth earl of Hardwicke. The first chapter of Lady in Waiting, covering her ‘idyllic’ early childhood, in which the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were often brought over to play, is entitled ...”

“... an entire chapter to the ways in which the plays of the period – such as the anonymous comedy George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In ...”

“... his life, not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he was; and Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw, who were hardly more than clerks. And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped ...”

“... cultural history of a parish, assembled from the inside. This material is selected and analysed in George Deacon’s John Clare and the Folk Tradition, one of the most informative and valuable studies of Clare’s poetry yet to appear. The total oeuvre proves him to have been an observer of his rural habitat on the same scale as Turner, though Clare’s ...”

“... group and a bronze eagle from the façade of the New Reich Chancellery replaces the far bigger bird made for Paris. Mukhina’s group, as one of the catalogue essays points out, must owe its basic conception (two figures striding forward in unison) to the antique statues of the tyrant killers made by Critios and Nesiote in 477-476 BC – just the sort of ...”

“... politicised his favourite mode with the onset of the Civil War – attacking his former friend George Wither for joining the Parliamentarians, for example, with the couplet ‘For Nonsence is Rebellion, and thy writing/Is nothing but Rebellious Warres inciting’ – Malcolm is so vehemently opposed to the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, for whom nonsense ...”

“... thing is that he goes into New York with a scrubby chin, looking perfectly foul.’ He described George Orwell (whom he met in 1944) as a ‘gentleman beachcomber’. Wodehouse’s writerly fans include some of the arch-blimps of Eng. Lit.: Hilaire Belloc called him ‘the best writer of English now alive . . . the head of my profession’; Evelyn Waugh ...”

“... volunteer wrote, ‘but there is no possible means of wearing it without looking like a moth-eaten bird with a broken wing.’ They were each allocated five rounds of ammunition. But, as one French Communist deputy told them in farewell, ‘What you lack in weapons you will make up for in courage.’ Orwell thought this was baloney. The opinions of the other ...”

“... Siberian crane dancing on the banks of the Irrawaddy River because the performance ended with the bird being shot by soldiers. Then there was the impeccable subheading to a cable from Dagestan: ‘Postscript: The Practical Uses of a Caucasus Wedding’. Not all were so light-hearted: other cables showed that many American diplomats didn’t want to be posted ...”

“... There was a Memorial Church, a Memorial Arch, a museum for Leland Jr’s bric-à-brac – jade bird, beaded necklace – and a mausoleum for his mortal remains. In 1893 an exact replica of his bedroom was installed in the museum. His father was added to the mausoleum later that year. An empty sarcophagus awaited his mother, its inscription already ...”

“... of hours in the sun eating candy and talking.’ Eileen had no axe to grind, which made her a rare bird among the expats in Barcelona and may have accounted for her charm in Charles and Lois’s eyes. For all their zeal, they were a lively, sociable couple. The fourth member of the party on that bucolic outing was ...”