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“... containing his correspondence with one or more persons – for example, Edward Garnett, William Blackwood and Cunninghame Graham. Early letters to Polish friends and relations have been translated, and a series of about a hundred to Marguerite Poradowska appeared in the original French. However, it seems that ‘more than a third of Conrad’s ...”

“... are brought into a sort of relation in the classic fashion of economics: a century earlier. Sir William Petty had valued an Englishman at £86/13/3, but then he probably would have applied a discount to Highlanders because of their violence, tartan, bagpipes, chivalry, Gaelic etc. Over the fate of the 800 men, let us not linger: actually, it doesn’t bear ...”

“... part is the Irish word dáire, meaning ‘wooded island’. The London prefix dates from 1613 when James 1 granted a charter to the Society of Governors and Assistants, London, of the New Plantation of Ulster, known then and now as the Honourable The Irish Society. The Hon. The Irish Society was strictly a business proposition, like the East India Company, and ...”

“... cultural boundary-crossing, opens Fintan O’Toole’s White Savage, on the fascinating career of William Johnson in 18th-century British America. Though well-known to scholars, Johnson’s story has not hitherto received the notice it deserves from the general readers who are clearly targeted here. O’Toole plans two follow-up volumes; his overall project ...”

“... do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of fortune, but ...”

“... At first it was supposed that William Marsh Rice, millionaire and founder of Rice University in Texas, had died from eating bananas; nine bananas, in fact, five baked and four raw. He had invited his valet Charlie Jones to join him. The valet, who later confessed that he had Chloroformed his employer, refused: ‘I told him that I was afraid of bananas and wouldn’t try any ...”

“... like that seems to have gone on with Ian Fleming. One could hardly say that his fantasy life with James Bond was a case of straightforward compensation. Employers courted him; he charmed the bosses; girls fell over each other to get to bed with him. Or so it seemed, and still seems to his latest biographer, who knew him fairly well in the wartime naval and ...”

“... Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s. The City was estranged as a result of Royal attacks on municipal and corporate privileges which have long ...”

“... than the vigorous High Victorian years. From the world of Landseer and Dickens to that of Henry James and Whistler, what Charles Darwin elsewhere called the ‘tone’ of mind had changed.Darwin turned 69 in February 1878. He felt that ‘large & difficult subjects’ were now beyond him and that ‘considering my age … it will be the more prudent course ...”

“... 29 August 1871, son of John Butler Yeats and Susan Yeats, at 23 Fitzroy Road, London. His brother, William Butler Yeats, was then six years old. John Butler Yeats was a portrait painter in search of commissions. Finding few, he thought it better to have his young son brought up, for the most part, by his grandparents in Sligo. Jack spent far more time in the ...”

“... James Clerk Maxwell, a Scotsman who lived from 1831 to 1879, was a scientist of outstanding stature. Bearing his name, apart from the famous ‘demon’, is the set of fundamental equations that he discovered, governing the behaviour of electricity, magnetism and light. He also found, among many other things, the basic equation for the distribution of velocities of the molecules in a gas in equilibrium, and made other profound contributions to the statistical study of the molecules in a gas, relating to the Second Law of thermodynamics – which is what Maxwell’s ‘demon’ was all about ...”

“... genre conflates Groom’s forgery with his plagiarism. In 19th-century Ireland, authors like William Maginn, Francis Sylvester Mahony and James Clarence Mangan were in the habit of producing literary texts cunningly modelled on the work of some well-known author like Tennyson or Thomas Moore, which they then coolly ...”

“... about the painter Whistler which catches at one’s imagination. It concerns his draughtsmanship. William Rothenstein recalls Whistler talking to him contemptuously of Oscar Wilde’s house in Tite Street and doing him a little drawing of it, to illustrate the monotony of such a terrace house. ‘I noticed then,’ says Rothenstein, ‘how childishly Whistler ...”

“... Macmillan and is protected now by the enthusiasm of men such as Roy Jenkins and Robert Rhodes James. But why should those of us who are excluded from this desirable club at Westminster want such an extended work of collective biography? In the case of these volumes one obvious reason lies in the period that they cover. They begin one year after the ...”

“... criticism in five words or fewer: on her third quarto of Othello, ‘a sad one’; on her copy of James Shirley’s The Constant Maid, or Love Will Find Out the Way, ‘I doe not lik this.’ Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it ...”