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“... This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes ...”

“... Edward’s reputation darkened during the Enlightenment, and the great Victorian historian William Stubbs condemned him as unsurpassed in vice and cruelty. More recent writing has brought Edward a partial rehabilitation, noting the administrative innovation and shrewd political management that characterised the later years of his reign. For ...”

“... up to regard the Washington political stage as his natural domain – his great-grandfather John Adams was the first president to live in the White House; his grandfather was John Quincy Adams – and he could never keep away from the city and its gossip for long. But his early political heroes soon revealed feet of ...”

“... Henry IV of England is ‘impulsive, changeable, irascible … unwilling to listen to advice’. John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy is ‘graceless, awkward and taciturn’, ‘brutal, cunning and duplicitous’, while his son, Philip the Good, is a playboy prince, given to ‘dancing, feasting, jousting, hunting and fornication’. Philip is admitted to be ...”

“... better than us. So let’s dutifully plough through these three bodice-rippers from Rudland and Stubbs, but call in Anita Brookner or Nadine Gordimer? No, no, we won’t do that, even if they have won the prize before. More than an abnegation of responsibility, this displayed a singular lack of curiosity. And while the judges annually complain about the ...”

“... linked him between the wars with G.M. Young, Baldwin, Kipling, Arthur Bryant, Helen Waddell, John Buchan and Vaughan Williams, who together form a cultural unity which needs discussion. During the second war, the same qualities made his Social History (1944) as much an expression of the wartime thirst for other worlds as Brideshead Revisited or The ...”

“... coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king. The son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, Henry was certainly Richard’s nearest male heir in 1399; but the seven-year-old Edmund, Earl of March, grandson of Philippa, the daughter of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, had through the female line a senior claim ...”

“... to us but which were nothing to be ashamed of in the 1780s and 90s – gluttony, for instance. John Beresford, who edited the Diary just after the First World War, sees it all quite differently, and his Introduction and Notes are a period piece in themselves. For Beresford, the Norfolk parson was ‘that very rare and beautiful bird – a typical ...”

“... Maybe this is a detective story,’ a character thinks in John Edgar Wideman’s novel Philadelphia Fire (1990). It’s a reasonable suspicion, and would be for anyone in any of Wideman’s books that I’ve read. But they are not detective stories. Often structured around a quest, for a missing child, a vanished woman, a former self, a meaning, an answer, they finally take the form of a flight, as if from a horror too great to bear or name, a shock one can only circle again and again, and at last abandon ...”

“... undignified and unnatural circus tricks. At the end of this formidable survey of the aristocracy John Beckett notes that they have survived into the late 20th century ‘as protectors of the nation’s heritage’ and that some ‘even argue that as collectors of beautiful objects over time their families were thinking not merely of self-interest but of the ...”

“... 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 the English School in the 1890s, the syllabus required undergraduates to demonstrate a historical knowledge and to relate literature to ...”

“... consistent, until ill-health restrained her, in going after it. Even Tomalin’s description of John Middleton Murry’s role in Mansfield’s life as ‘crucial and largely unfortunate’ seems to me glib. Is it right to ignore, as Tomalin does, that farewell letter in which Mansfield wrote: ‘I think no two lovers ever walked the earth more joyfully ...”

“... temporary hang by a small team led by one of the very best living historians of modern art, John Elderfield, of works of 1880 to 1920 in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. I cannot say much about its most hotly debated section, ‘People’, because my only sight of it was an hour’s visit hot from the airport on the night it ...”

“... and a preoccupation with constitutional history caused feelings about Edward to change. Bishop Stubbs, ‘peering down on the Middle Ages from the twin heights of an episcopal throne and a professorial chair’, as Mortimer puts it, condemned Edward as ‘ambitious, unscrupulous, selfish, extravagant and ostentatious’. In more recent times, historians ...”

“... on a hideous yacht. The romance went out of New Romanticism the minute the band’s bass player, John Taylor, in the video for the single ‘Rio’, crawled up the beach with a rifle to help a lady who was being splashed with champagne, followed quickly by their singer, Simon Le Bon, diving into the blue Antiguan waters wearing a pair of budgie ...”