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“... Thomas Adolphus Trollope (Anthony’s brother), and wrote novels. Maria Ternan married a rich brewer, had no children, separated, and eventually became a New Woman and a journalist. Less talented than Fanny, less clever than Maria, but prettier than either, Ellen was supported by Dickens for 13 dubious years. In 1870 she ‘reinvented herself’. She cut ...”

“... of Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, including, a few weeks ago, our current island governor John Major. The BBC’s (by now rather crowded) island retreat both affirms and denies the insular character of Britain itself: once there, you would have the advantages of an island without the British climate and the rest of the British people. The Prime ...”

“... only other models,’ she writes in this new biography, ‘are Renaissance figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the ...”

“... retirement, not necessarily early. Any series-editor would be proud of a team which includes Derek Brewer, Derek Traversi, D.W. Harding, L.G. Salingar, Peter Ure, Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and ...”

“... responsible for introducing the young Sydney Parkinson to Joseph Banks. The son of an Edinburgh brewer and a fellow Quaker of Lee’s, Parkinson had begun to demonstrate promise as a flower painter. Banks was on the look-out for such talents, to employ on the illustrating of his natural-history collections; and having tried him out on his zoological ...”

“... were commonly taught together. The Shakespearean critic A.C. Bradley and the historian J.S. Brewer had chairs in literature and history. In the 1870s the subjects might have grown up as a single faculty at Oxford had not Bishop Stubbs, the Regius Professor of History, vetoed the proposal. When Oxford gave social respectability to Eng. Lit. by founding ...”

“... Nearby was Portman Square, another highly-sought rectangle, the contractor for which was John Elwes, scion of a family of congenital and pathological misers, himself one of the London rich. For a long period these proud squares stood incongruously on the edge of open country, highwayman-haunted. There was much to be said for a mansion in Grosvenor ...”

“... victims of what Outram diagnoses as the failure to transcend homo clausus. The liberal speculator, John Stuart Mill, asked himself if he’d be happy were all his projects to be fulfilled, answered no, and fell into suicidal despair. Substitute mammon for his mission, and Mill’s tale can be repeated for Messrs Merdle and Melmotte, the classic overreaching ...”

“... the law to the will of the king. No one understands exactly how the son of a blacksmith and brewer managed to become the king’s principal secretary and eventually, in 1536, privy seal, but his energy, efficiency and brutality played their part, along with his eye for detail and the bottom line. At the moment when Cromwell was making his discreet but ...”

“... fictional death was perhaps intended as a protective measure because neither her supposed father, John Pemberton, nor her real father was of much use to her. In the novel Peregrine, on being told of Sophia’s pregnancy, ‘put on a very sad face, then put his face in his hands, but he cheered quite soon and said, “Perhaps it will be born dead.”’Comyns ...”

“... subjects; in her book Treasure-House of the Language: The Living ‘OED’ (2007), Charlotte Brewer discusses the latter, noting that philately and pottery are more patchily represented than surfing and cricket. For the most part reviewers of the Supplement were quick to praise its treatment of World Englishes. But Ogilvie is right to question the common ...”

“... anchorite St Alphege, who in Rees-Mogg’s exegesis was England’s first tax martyr; and John Locke, whom he characterised with cynical vagueness as a champion of the people against government. That speech set the key for his parliamentary excursions into history and literature, armed with the kind of cute patriotic simpleness one might have found in ...”

“... politics’ attitude to history; finding in Cromwell’s archives the main strain of events, Brewer, Gairdner and the rest (destroyers of archives) made it the heart of their edition, whereas the personal and family affairs of the Lisles could be interspersed in the calendar without being incorporated in SP 1. So there they lay (available and mostly used ...”

“... Ifirst​ walked along Brewer Street when I was 13. I was looking for a shop that sold film posters. It’s a long story, a four-hanky number, and it started in Glasgow the previous summer when I bumped into a busload of visiting Californians. I’d got talking to a woman who told me her friend had once been Marilyn Monroe’s nurse – I’m not making this up – and we swapped addresses ...”

“... subtitle, however, foregrounds a further complication. Hester Salusbury married first the wealthy brewer, MP, womaniser and ‘Southwark macaroni’ Henry Thrale, with whom she had 12 children, only four of whom survived, and then the Italian music master Gabriel Piozzi, for whom she pined passionately at the ripe old age of 40, and scandalised her circle by ...”