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“... wasn’t written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern biography, biography with ...”

“... kept it there. A slightly unlikely but highly qualified member of Our (or Their) Age was William Empson, who went up to Cambridge in 1925 and down again in disgrace in 1929. There are three essays on Empson in this book, and he and his teacher I.A. Richards are in one sense its heroes, variable and (in Empson’s case) not always admirable advocates ...”

“... It’s a relief. The centuries after Burns’s death have produced some honest fiction about him (James Barke’s quintet of novels are the best known). But there has also been a procession of biographers dressing their own Burns dolls in their own favourite costumes. There was the ‘heav’n-taught ploughman’ school, mourning an Ayrshire nightingale ...”

“... of as ifs.’ There are apparently 266 in Great Expectations alone. Where George Eliot and Henry James used analogy to guide interpretation of what a character might be thinking or feeling, in Dickens it is always a performance on the author’s part, a conjuring of unlikely associations (he was a gifted amateur magician). Mullan, however, rightly insists ...”

“... achieves manhood, even if with a coarser, colder and more withdrawn self; he becomes what Henry James called ‘finely aware and richly responsible’, as a literary hero for James preferably should be. This is beyond Henry’s ken. It may also be a sign of the tragedy’s formidable solidity, a statement about the cost ...”

“... book is a magisterial study of a great popular artist: a full-scale interpretation of James Gillray’s output of satirical prints, and a biography that warrants comparison with the best ever done on an 18th-century artist. It has been furnished with gorgeous reproductions, along with close-ups that illuminate Gillray’s care for visual detail ...”

“... the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and forks, but he was not embarrassed. William Shirer, Berlin Diary The first episode, in 1901, concerns the behaviour of British, Russian, German and other allied troops, after the defeat of the Boxer rebellion in China. The second took place during the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese Imperial Army ...”

“... thus only marginally gentlefolk. As committed Unitarians, both Samuel and his minister brother, William, were dedicated to ideas of rational social progress, and Samuel himself was a workaholic. His friend John Forster described him on their joint holiday, knitting his brows over work ‘as if America were just discovered’. Before he was 30 he was in ...”

“... the comparison vivid by observing that the cost of lace on a gown worn in 1613 by the daughter of James I was, at £1700, ‘more valuable than all but a few paintings in the famous collection of his brother, Charles I’. At the same time a certain value, undefinable in economic terms, came to be attached to the ownership of paintings which had no equivalent ...”

“... spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting affords Seamus Heaney a remarkable opportunity, of which he takes remarkable advantage, to ruminate, not only on his very ...”

“... envoy of George III. Nobody in Beijing knew why he was there. He assumed that his commission from William Pitt made him an ambassador, and that his mission was to negotiate new trade relations between Britain and the Qing empire. Like many in Britain he believed that the ‘Canton System’ was designed to restrict the scope of British trade at Guangzhou and ...”

“... self reading ‘The Tree of Justice’ in Rewards and Fairies, the old madman brought before King William by Rahere the Jester revealed as Harold Godwin, and Hugh, the Saxon knight, kneeling to him. And ‘each time,’ writes Inglis, ‘the queer, crisp ripple of excitement tingled along my spine; the brimming tears which never quite fell, the chokey lump in ...”

“... progress through the collective psyche of her country’. Historians, beginning with John Foxe and William Camden in her own time, and extending across the centuries to Patrick Collinson and David Starkey in our own, have examined Elizabeth’s reign from a variety of angles, analysing its various subtle strategies and compromises, attempting to evaluate what ...”

“... or, as Joyce put it, ‘privysuckatary’ – to the retired diplomat and belletrist Sir William Temple. Swift may even have been an illegitimate half-brother of Temple, Damrosch suggests (one might say speculates). But it’s tempting to see him more as the hapless Dorothea to Temple’s Casaubon, sentenced on his patron’s death to ten ...”

“... though less widely recorded, among others. What there was, according to Favret, was the poet William Cowper, publishing The Task in 1785 in the aftermath of the American War of Independence, which must be considered a global war even if it did not involve the sheer manpower of the campaigns against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Cowper is at the ...”