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“... There were​ high hopes for the son of Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, the grandson of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, but the boy told his mother that all he wanted was a quiet life and a sailing boat. She wasn’t wholly disappointed at his failure to distinguish himself. When it was suggested at school that he needed to learn to think for himself, Mary Shelley said: ‘Oh God, teach him to think like other people!’ Percy Florence was unusual in a uniformly cerebral family ...”

“... Though he was soon to change his views, the best readings of his poetry are sensitive, as Nicholas Murray points out, to the ‘strangeness of his genius’, and avoid tidy ideological categories. We need to attend to the ‘uncanny tremor of implication’ that makes the lucid surfaces of his poems ‘shimmer with a sense of something undefined and ...”

“... that is now infecting schools and public services. Reactionary intellectuals such as Douglas Murray have identified Black feminist theories of ‘intersectionality’ as the root of the West’s current malaises. This rhetoric is far from harmless, as attested by the censorship of gender studies by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, and similar ...”

“... this awkward attack that Harsnett diverted attention back to the exorcisms conducted by the Jesuit William Weston at Denham and other places in 1585-6; various participants were tracked down to be interrogated, their depositions and a Book of Miracles kept by the priests forming the basis for Harsnett’s scornful treatise of 1603. Professor Walker makes ...”

“... and within two years he’d hatched another plan. In Baltimore he’d fallen in love with Anna Murray, a free black woman. She provided funds, documents that enabled him to travel (‘free papers’ lent by a retired black sailor) and naval costume – and Douglass took a series of trains north. On 4 September 1838 he arrived in New York: ‘I was a ...”

“... was snowing butterflies,’ and such in fact was the appearance.In 1845 the publisher John Murray reissued the book for a large public. Darwin became a literary celebrity. Voyage of the Beagle (to use the title Murray gave it) is a vivid travelogue, but it also carries heavy theoretical freight. Darwin was struck by ...”

“... Bellow replied that his study had been English literature. He was asked to give his opinion of William Wordsworth as a poet. He responded that he had always thought of William Wordsworth as one of the Romantics. ‘There is no place for you,’ said Chambers on hearing this, ‘in this organisation.’ The future Nobel ...”

“... you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with something close to ...”

“... his mindset differs from that of most of the country writers who have stayed with me indelibly: William Cobbett of Rural Rides, a farmer’s son and himself a farmer from time to time; John Muir of My First Summer in the Sierra, a farmer’s son and farmer; and Lewis Grassic Gibbon of A Scots Quair, a farmer’s son from the Mearns in north-east ...”

“... Henry Clutton, who had originally been appointed and had done the Chapter House (assisted by William Burges, experimenting with colours), rendered himself ineligible by converting to Catholicism.Had Clutton continued, the cathedral would be a building rather different from the one we see today. He wasn’t a man to hide his Francophile ...”

“... says, more smartly and sassily, less mysteriously, in another story. Of course it was also, as Les Murray puts it, ‘the years of the Coffee Revolution/and the Smallgoods Renaissance’. ‘Now we have Sony and Panasonic; we have Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson,’ one of Li’s speakers notes, with as much historiographic brilliance. I tried hard to find ...”

“... of anecdotes which illustrate exactly that. While still a student, for example, she stood up to William Gladstone when he came to Cambridge to visit his student daughter. He asked Harrison which her favourite Greek author was. The prudent answer would have been ‘Homer’, Gladstone’s own favourite, but – to annoy, and not wholly truthfully – she ...”

“... that Johnson and Fuseli may have been lovers. It seems unlikely. At one point the young John Murray, founder of the publishing dynasty who was now established in the Strand and was a friend of Johnson, reported to a correspondent that Johnson had got over a spot of bother with venereal disease – ‘I hear nothing of his I-ch nor the bountifull Lady who ...”

“... who clearly understood that he was to see it through the press, but the nervous publisher John Murray preferred the politically safe editorial hand of William Gifford. The material censored by Murray and Gifford now appears in full, and McGann is right to point to the enhancement of ...”

“... the science that came most immediately into conflict with scripture, obliging Lyell’s teacher William Buckland to contain his visions of lost worlds and extinct monsters within the biblical framework of Creation, Fall and Deluge. Lyell, by birth a Tory squire but by conviction a metropolitan Whig, had a solid grasp of conservative anxieties: he abstained ...”