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“... 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 ...”

“... in the bottom left-hand corner. ‘It seemed such a marvellous place to have a rainbow!’ Patrick George, a considerable Rubenist, once said to me. But Lisa Vergara’s destination is the idyllic landscapes of the last years of his life – and they no longer show ‘phenomena’ in this sense. There are no catastrophes and no perils. Instead there is the ...”

“... and liked to think he had enjoyed a romantic friendship with Princess Charlotte, George IV’s daughter, whose royal blood rendered her inaccessible. They exchanged letters and gifts, but it amounted, we are told, to ‘little more than une amitié amoureuse’. The Duke wept when the Princess died in childbirth, but so did all England. In ...”

“... There are two British world-class painters, Turner and Constable; but there are a number of others – at least as original and interesting as their contemporaries on the Continent – who created the English School of painting in the first two thirds of the 18th century. Starting with Hogarth, the first major native-born painter, they can be roughly divided into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake ...”

“... an injustice by her ‘much-quoted remark’ that her motive had been to gain as much publicity as George Sand, who had scandalised Chamonix by turning up in her ‘ideologically significant male garb, accompanied by a youth dressed as a woman’. In her book Henriette’s explanation runs to waffle: ‘The soul has needs, as does the body, peculiar to each ...”

“... destined to be hanged in 1946 for the lurid murders of young women (the wartime careers of John George Haigh, the ‘acid bath murderer’, and John Christie, the serial killer, are also noted). The 50,000 arrests claimed by the Army’s investigative branch were not for failure to salute, or to polish a bucket, but for the sorts of knavery all too current ...”

“... five miles up. By the war’s end the force, which at its peak had numbered 1,793,000, had won two George Crosses and 13 George Medals. A total of 1206 volunteers were either killed on duty or died from wounds. Piquant items from Graham McCann’s book about Dad’s Army have been widely quoted, notably the insistence by ...”

“... unemployed as gardeners). Usborne the indefatigable has resolved to read more of a writer called George Ade, who had a pretty turn of phrase and may have influenced the master. His Knocking the Neighbours (1911) contains the following:    He had a temperature of 102 and his ears were hanging down. Also, during the period of coma, someone had extracted ...”

“... or hereditary politicians, and many, like Benn, were both. His father had fallen out with Lloyd George in December 1916, and drifted towards the Labour Party, which eventually made him Secretary of State for India in 1929-31 and, briefly, Secretary of State for Air in the Attlee Government. The Benn family were publishers (like the Macmillan family, though ...”

“... is well able to translate for us). Levi also knows enough about Greek literature to reveal that George Seferis wrote a book of limericks for a grandson and reminds us – though readers of this journal need no reminding – that the French had their limericks too. He is much exercised by Lear’s old person of Sparta, who had 25 sons and one daughter ...”

“... be found in Humphry Clinker. Jane Austen admits no gouty males to her novels, not even in Bath. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch gout ‘becomes a symbol for an entire society’ and poor Dr Lydgate ends up miserably writing a treatise on the subject. The authors expected to find plenty about gout in Conrad, who suffered diabolically from the malady, but found ...”

“... old doodlebug’, which gave everyone a chance to bolt for cover when the engine cut out. George Orwell in Tribune said that what depressed him about V-2s was ‘the way they set people talking about the next war’, when no doubt rockets would be fired across the Atlantic. It was odd that no rocket dropped on the ‘square mile’ of the City of ...”

“... as the Earl of Chesterfield said, ‘he was taken by many at a distance for a gilt garland.’ George Brummell, an equally famous beau of a later day, would have thought that irredeemably vulgar. Yet Bath, a city in the ascendant, needed someone like Nash. When the 18th century came in it was half spa, half pleasure resort. The haut ton found Tunbridge ...”

“... Mess is one of the distinguishing features of Janette Turner Hospital’s writing, but also one of its abiding themes: and part of the reader’s difficulty has always been to decide how much of the mess is intention, and how much miscalculation. The characters in Borderline, her 1985 novel which has many formal similarities with The Last Magician (including an obsession with Dante), are all engaged in transgressing boundaries, whether willingly or not, and the title story of her collection Isobars makes explicit its preoccupation with ‘ideas of order’ imposed upon a messy and shifting reality Lines drawn on a map, she wrote in that story, are ‘talismanic’ and represent ‘the magical thinking of quantitative and rational people ...”

“... kind. Officers of crack regiments disliked postings to the social death of factory towns. Captain George Brummell, learning that his regiment, the Tenth Light Dragoons, was to be sent north, sought permission of his colonel, the Prince of Wales, to resign his commission: ‘Think, your Royal Highness – Manchester!’ To which the Prince replied: ‘Oh, by ...”