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“... The haunted picture became a cliché of Gothic fiction and the scene on show is set in a lofty hall with crocketed niches and heraldic displays of armour much like Walpole’s own, across which our heroine, skirts and headdress flying, pursues the villain, who clutches a wriggling Leolyn under one arm. One of the attractions of melodrama, in both ...”

“... stay in Italy. Then after Christmas I read Gabriele Annan’s review in the LRB (7 January) of James Fox’s The Langhorne Sisters – Nancy had been the middle one of the five – and began to understand. Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now in his nineties and still ...”

“... male power, the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey. Like the third storey at Thornfield Hall from whose terrace Jane surveys the landscape, vowing to have her share of life, even if she is a female and ‘poor, obscure and plain’ to boot, Galesia’s ‘garret-closet’ occupies a symbolic space between the life she lives and the life she ...”

“... The book includes Hecht’s most frequently anthologised poem, ‘The Dover Bitch’, a music-hall turn on Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. There were also poems that held private, darker meanings, especially ‘More Light! More Light!’, about a savage incident at Buchenwald. The Hard Hours won the Pulitzer Prize.Hecht indulged in such dark ...”

“... streetlights – and wonder what’s locked in all those boxes. At the count in the King’s Hall the following day, a journalist tells me it was 200 years ago this morning that Lord Edward Fitzgerald issued the order for the United Irish Uprising to commence. A man my age points to a former terrorist a yard from us: ‘Hi, see thon fella – he put a ...”

“... alive. ‘I think he has had – will have had – the most exquisite literary fortune,’ Henry James wrote to Edmund Gosse when Pater died in 1894, ‘i.e. to have taken it out all, wholly, exclusively, with the pen (the style, the genius) & absolutely not at all with the person. He is the mask without the face.’ For ...”

“... Laird of Abbotsford, graced with titles (baronet and sheriff), broad acres and his own baronial hall. Success is the central theme of John Sutherland’s book too. But step by step he unwraps Lockhart’s packaging, beginning with the anecdotes. Too many couldn’t have occurred at the date specified: Sutherland refers drily to Lockhart’s ‘usual ...”

“... of it or not, all four of them also betray confusion, flux and anxiety. The dust-jacket blurb of James Lees-Milne’s People and Places suggests this right away. His book, it tells us, is an ‘extraordinary, amusing and touching picture ... of an England now lost’. The story will be a familiar one to those who have read his published diaries. In ...”

“... formed less than two years previously (they would become the King’s Men after the accession of James I in 1603). They were already the most popular troupe in town, with their leading actor Richard Burbage and their star comic Will Kempe, and their player-poet Shakespeare turning out such hits as Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s ...”

“... event. On 5 June 1607, at Holy Trinity, Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna was married to John Hall, a 32-year-old physician. By the end of the summer a still happier outcome must have been apparent (‘she rounds apace’), for their daughter Elizabeth was born in February 1608, less than nine months after the wedding. ...”

“... off here and there the note of each species, as if he had been a child left alone in a concert hall with the deserted instruments of a full orchestra. Finding a sealion snoring on the bank of its pool, he rippled the water suddenly. He was a quarter of a mile away when he heard the responding bark.In this vision of an animal meeting neighbours he has never ...”

“... She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently. There was a narrow passageway between the wall of crates and her personal pile of stuff: banana boxes, a disused bead curtain, a mop bucket. One of the crates has crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer rears up out of ...”

“... THE FAMILY IS A PRISON. Two Communist students are sticking fresh posters up at the back of the hall, showing a muscular young construction worker gazing off towards something fine in the distance. Meanwhile a woman is going from desk to desk, placing flyers on each one. GERMAN LESSONS, it reads. Stasinopoulou seems a gentle woman, and it was disconcerting ...”

“... films as Gandhi (a severe treatment of the Raj), A Passage to India, and Heat and Dust, even the James Bond spectacular Octopussy, kept the Indian sub-continent securely in the public’s imagination. One of the most triumphant television productions of the decade was ITV’s dramatisation of Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ under the title The Jewel in the ...”

“... True, no. Room goes in for a lot of roguish commenting but not for annotation when it is needed. James McConnell, The Benedictine Commando, 1981 – For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night. Room: ‘The dedication suggests a quotation.’ And that’s true too. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, actually. An editor ought to rise to an occasional ...”