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“... perhaps, but also a reminder that Curll, by publishing the 1725 Works, did more than anyone before Thomas Hollis in the 1760s to keep alive Marvell’s reputation. Curll’s intertwining of seduction and sedition was targeted and exploited by the authorities, and his belated prosecution for publishing pornographic titles including Venus in the ...”

“... memoirs and mostly familiar to historians. Old friends include George Robertson, Joseph Mitchell, Thomas Somerville and Ramsay of Ochtertyre. The accounts are separated into themes, such as school, factory and mine, leisure, crime (though none of the memorialists claim active participation in this). The excerpts are long enough to carry the style and emphasis ...”

“... misplaced desire to tease. John Wilkes met all these criteria, and was therefore much loved. Peter Thomas has produced the first serious study of Wilkes for some years. This neglect is surprising, in that Wilkes was the quintessential English Radical. With few teeth, a pronounced lisp and one of the most famous squints in history, he leers out of Hogarth’s ...”

“... ideological weapons against Russian ‘barbarism’ and the ‘superficial’ British and French. Thomas Mann’s Observations of a Non-Political Man, published in 1916, is the prize exhibit of historians concerned to pin down this pattern of thinking. The same mental set has often been viewed as an important enabling element in the coming of National ...”

“... and she’s better-looking than Stuart. Last week at lunch, much of the Oscar talk focused on Gordon Wood, Professor of History at Brown. Wood is here on a year’s fellowship to write Volume IV of the new Oxford History of the United Sates, but he has also spent the odd moment reflecting on Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, of Good Will Hunting. Wood’s ...”

“... in the 1820s as a triumphal entrance for Buckingham Palace, then relocated to Hyde Park, where Thomas Cubitt rebuilt it in 1851. But – because Nash’s original plans for reliefs commemorating English victories in the Napoleonic conflict were never fully executed – the triumph it celebrates is an oddly blank one. After it was ‘islanded’ in ...”

“... thrived. In 1960, however, a now financially shaky Heinemann and its satellites were acquired by Thomas Tilling, an industrial group with a main interest in construction. They were not, however, interventionist owners and the publishing activities went on much as before, although by the early 1970s Warburg had retired and Secker’s was managed (very ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the blessing was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression ...”

“... at interrogation centred upon food rather than sex. English diarists – Evelyn as well as Pepys, Thomas Turner as well as Parson Woodforde – confide their meals to paper as readily as their other concerns. One reason why Keats makes better reading than Shelley is that he had a superior gust for eating and drinking, and found a language for it in verse and ...”

“... matters in these circumstances that one of the best essays in the collection, J.P. Stern’s on Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull in the light of Nietzschean views of metaphor and morality, should be concerned solely with German literature. It is principally by asking what a literary canon is that the editor has sought to give some sort of shape to her ...”

“... find the money for Oxford; the interview for a job at Leeds University, where kind Professor E.V. Gordon, a quiet Canadian, just happened to murmur that he knew of some suitable digs. And at those digs there were already three students, one reading medicine. She married me some twenty months later. So if it hadn’t occurred to E.V. ...”

“... were also mad. Others were content simply to drive their editors mad. Our first baron is James Gordon Bennett Sr (1785-1872), the man who raised the American press from its venal, corrupt impotence to earn such accolades from his contemporaries as ‘vulgar depraved wretch’, ‘obscene foreign vagabond, and leprous slanderer and libeller, a turkey ...”

“... Howard Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy governor of the Bank of England, having just been involved in that same capacity in seeking a ...”

“... of her less perceptive observations: she was hardly right about everything. In an obituary, Helen Thomas, a journalist Mitchell liked to ring, said: ‘She was a personal victim of the political war of Watergate, and one of its very few heroines.’ Five years after the Watergate break-in, Nixon said: ‘If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have ...”

“... Like many​ recent political memoirists, Gordon Brown begins his story in medias res. Given his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial crisis, there should have been plenty of arresting moments to choose from. Some, though, are already taken. Alistair Darling, for instance, starts Back from the Brink, his 2011 account of what it was like being Brown’s chancellor, on Tuesday, 7 October 2008, when Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of RBS, called him to announce that his bank was about to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it ...”