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“... of Persons, the first volume of his celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), William Black stone concluded his account of how the law makes a husband and wife one person by suggesting that the legal disappearance of the married Englishwoman was effectively a tribute to her sex. ‘These are the chief legal effects of marriage during the ...”

“... a quarter of a century ago, supplies one clue. The narrator is set off by a recollection of Henry James, who after fifty years remembered ‘a boy cousin being sketched in the nude at Newport before his life was “cut short, in a cavalry clash, by one of the Confederate bullets of 1863” ’.Death, summer, youth – this triad contrives to haunt me every ...”

“... what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping ...”

“... In March​ 1718, 13-year-old William Murray, the 11th of Viscount Stormont’s 14 children, set off from the family seat at Scone, near Perth, on a pony. The journey to London, which he made alone, took him almost two months, and it is probable that he never saw Scotland again. Although it was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone as a scholar ...”

“... children at their accession, most of them still in the cradle. (Mary Queen of Scots and her son, James VI, were also to succeed to the Scottish throne as infants.) The Stewarts were plagued by their history of monarchs dying violently and dying young (James I and James III were murdered ...”

“... through place comes and goes, but when it comes it often has a countercultural bent. The antiquary William Camden called it ‘a new kind of learning’ when he published his topographical history the Britannia in 1586, in a bid to remake local and historic connections severed by the Reformation. A Society of Antiquaries was duly formed, but it was abruptly ...”

“... the manhunt undertaken by Charles II’s restored government for two men, Edward Whalley and William Goffe. Their names appeared, alongside Ludlow’s, on Charles I’s death warrant in 1649. Whalley was a first cousin of Oliver Cromwell and his was the fourth signature on the warrant. Goffe, his son-in-law, was the fourteenth signatory; Ludlow was the ...”

“... fir. The sea poem had come a long way from ‘Casabianca’. As a historian, Carr is ecumenical: William Brooke Smith, a student who died of tuberculosis in 1908, is given as much consideration as Pound’s other early friend William Carlos Williams; Marianne Moore, who matriculated at Bryn Mawr in the same year as ...”

“... So they levered their way in and started to ask for more – much more. The key figures were William Morris and Abe Lastfogel (who together formed the William Morris Agency), Phil Berg, Myron Selznick (who found Vivien Leigh for his brother David), Leland Hayward and, most significant, Lew Wasserman, Ovitz’s abiding ...”

“... there is the old-fashioned Calvinism of that doyen of Puritan scholars, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. Although the first system was less dogmatic than the second, both of them closed their adherents’ minds. Between them lay the third, altogether healthier response: the sceptical, rational Anglicanism of the Great Tew Circle, of Clarendon and his ...”

“... Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered to him is rarely clear, as by his own account it seems to have no particular influence on the ...”

“... place in any reputable account of the origins of the ‘Puritan Revolution’; and high time too. William Hunt, whose book is ostensibly about pre-Civil War Essex but really about many things besides, calls it The Puritan Moment. The argument nowadays is not about the political importance of religious conflicts but about their nature. If there is an orthodoxy ...”

“... Adrian and Pandora, his priggish girlfriend, the cardboard foils. It is the situation of Just William reversed. The children strive for an appearance of competence, the adults achieve anarchy. Because there are jokes on every page the bleak facts take a little time to emerge; and the very excellence of the television acting tended to make one miss ...”

“... as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those old fellows are done,’ he was to be heard insisting. ‘Exploded! ... Fichus! ... No good! ... Finished!’ Lewis’s beef was with literary ‘impressionism’: with novels which sought intricately to render the movements, at once furtive ...”

“... in Enfield, North London; Hillingdon, the closest emergency hospital to Heathrow Airport; and the James Paget in Great Yarmouth – declared their beds 100 per cent full on more than half the days in that winter period. Between them, the hospitals in Worcester and neighbouring Redditch had to divert emergency patients elsewhere at least 65 times. At Derriford ...”