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“... But what irritated Priestley was his rejection of the 18th-century novelists – Fielding, Sterne, Goldsmith, Smollett – whom Priestley most admired, whom he had learnt from, before whom he ‘felt humble’. Leavis, Priestley said, ‘did mischief to the art he was boarded and lodged to serve’ – rather a revealing comment. ‘To be an author was to ...”

“... years later it returned to private enterprise, when the City handed over its public powers to a goldsmith called Hugh Myddelton, whose name still adorns the streets of Islington. Three years after that it became a public-private initiative, with James I underwriting half the costs in return for half the profits. In 1631, Charles I was persuaded to swap ...”

“... various confident and sagacious Anglo-Irish voices were raised in deliberation or mockery. Swift, Goldsmith, Sheridan: these turn up in the Oxford anthology, alongside the anonymous authors of such demotic verses as ‘Lilli Burlero’ – the title and refrain of this Orange song is surely the transliteration of an Irish phrase, An lile ba leir ee- ba linn ...”

“... advocacy of slavery was undoubtedly intended as a provocation, but was not necessarily insincere. John Law of Lauriston made his own distinctive contribution to the debate, in Money and Trade Considered: with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (1705). Law’s panacea was a system of paper money, underwritten not by precious metals or the ...”

“... appeared in a Westminster court for a pre-extradition hearing, there was the odd spectacle of John Pilger and Ken Loach outside pledging surety for Assange’s bail, along with Jemima Khan, the daughter of the late tycoon and anarcho-capitalist James Goldsmith, whose contributions to British public life included ...”

“... came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of ...”

“... when monolithically conceived, has not always been open, for instance, to Swift, Burke and Goldsmith. Yeats excluded the Anglo-Irish 18th century when he first advocated a ‘national’ literature. The Gaelic ideologue Daniel Corkery went further and excluded Yeats. During the Twenties, when the Southern Protestant population was under pressure, Yeats ...”

“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... at length by the British branch of the International Freedom Federation – patronised by Jimmy Goldsmith and John Aspinall, and run by a yoofish wild bunch who had come up through the Federation of Conservative Students in the second Thatcher term. When Savimbi rejected the results of the elections in 1992 (which proved ...”

“... opened to ‘anyone who wished’ to see it, an occasion that coincided with the festivities of St John the Baptist, Florence’s patron saint, when the city put its richest treasures on view. For Vasari, the extraction of the David from a mangled block of marble was nothing short of a miracle; Michelangelo had succeeded in ‘bringing back to life one who was ...”

“... author of The History of British India.’ The father-author thus announced at the beginning of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography dominated his life from early childhood on. Did he in any sense author his son’s life as he authored his books? John Stuart Mill wrote his own Life in large part to work out an answer to ...”

“... intermittently filled this kind of slot, beginning in 1947, when they commissioned the Labour MP John Parker and the Conservative MP Quintin Hogg, now Lord Hailsham, to produce books of a couple of hundred pages each. ‘When the manuscripts were received,’ the publishers were forced to reveal, ‘it was found that while Mr Parker had kept closely to the ...”

“... English oak [with] a woman’s face on the back’. The lower orders collected possessions too. John Elmesley can’t have earned much as a servant to a wax chandler, but he took in his godson, Robert Sharp, and in his will provided him with all the things a little boy needed: a small featherbed with two pairs of fitted sheets; a dining set marked with the ...”

“... many of them) that Amis received: several hundred from Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and others. These letters help supply the answers to niggling editorial puzzles: for example, the identity of ‘Bluebell’ (Conquest’s dog), or ‘engine driver Hunt’, from a passage in a letter reading ‘Praed, Hood, Gilbert ...”

“... life of Civvy Street, when the Kray Twins ruled London – or so the timorous newspapers claimed. John Dickson, a former member of the Krays’ firm, has somehow produced a well-written book, Murder without Conviction. ‘We looked like any normal businessmen in our pin-striped suits,’ he says, describing the firm’s negotiations with the Mafia. The Krays ...”