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“... for his religious beliefs in the reign of Charles I would have been his favoured archbishop, William Laud? What justice did the John Hothams, father and son, get for defying their king when he attempted to claim his magazine of arms and munitions at Hull? They were subsequently executed by order of Parliament. How could the oracles of the common law ...”

“... Early issues of Plebs included a series of articles on Greek and Roman economic development by William Craik, a railway worker from South Wales who had enrolled at Ruskin.Mansbridge, Craik, De Leon, the Plebs League, the WEA and Ruskin College find no place in Stray’s account. Their absence demonstrates the need for Hall and Stead’s book, which takes ...”

“... for such treatment. He was extremely intelligent. Leaving aside Henry VIII, Charles II and William III, he was perhaps our cleverest King since the Middle Ages. He had polished manners, and was also musical, a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were ...”

“... chivalric ideal in modern society, nor was it to be the last. Already, in 1825, the tall tower of William Beckford’s new baronial hall. Font-hill Abbey, had collapsed without warning. A few years after the Eglinton debacle, one of the day’s leading artists, William Dyce, was commissioned to paint allegorical frescoes on ...”

“... diabolic Castlereagh figure ‘tossed’ the dogs ‘human hearts to chew’. In the same year, Byron set out Castlereagh’s misanthropic and authoritarian vision of the world in Don Juan: States to be curb’d, and thoughts to be confined, Conspiracy or Congress to be made – Cobbling at manacles for all mankind – A tinkering slave-maker, who mends ...”

“... their earliest included poem). The first half of the book has (in order) Tennyson, Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in several cases ...”

“... really separates a masterpiece of the genre like Greene’s from a frequently attractive work like William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu is that Greene seeks no pretext or context or subtext for his trip other than himself. Dalrymple’s, on the other hand, is both complicated and distracted by his notion of retracing the ancient travels of Marco Polo from Jerusalem ...”

“... independently in different historical periods. In The Cuckqueanes and Cuckolds Errants (c. 1601), William Percy used a double parenthesis in a speech by Pearle to suggest a pearl within an oyster; and in the novel Foe (1986) J.M. Coetzee wrote of storytelling: ‘Teasing and braiding can, like any craft, be learned. But as to determining which episodes hold ...”

“... moving to a peak, or more usually a series of mountains or molehills, before going into decline. William Pitt the Younger is the great exception. Because of his parentage and abnormal abilities he began at the top. Entering the House of Commons at the age of 21, which was by law the minimum age, although Charles James Fox had earlier been ‘elected’ when ...”

“... solipsistic way of thinking’. Surely this is overstated: the letters of Jane Austen or Lord Byron are quite as dash-sprinkled as Sancho’s. Equiano’s autobiography and Sancho’s letters, both recently reprinted, are worth recovering, and have had a powerful influence on black British authors. Sandhu notes that several of the contemporary writers ...”

“... little shirts, and ‘kiss as though it had been God Himself’. (Four hundred years later, Lord Byron thought that Venetian women kissed better than any other, which he attributed to the worship of images and ‘the early habit of osculation induced thereby’.) Thomas More, who would become a saint himself, might insist that simple people could read images ...”

“... But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but the three poets in question ...”

“... and so liable to insult, which she got, and fended off for herself. Her father, the Micawberish William Godwin, was unlikely to be able to assist her once she reached London; he had grown accustomed to the bounty of his son-in-law without any prospect of repaying it. (In one of her letters Mary loyally urges a correspondent to remember to inscribe ...”

“... the stock satiric material) is an almost affecting sombreness. ‘Almost’ affecting, because William Pirates, the reclusive eccentric who is meant to evoke it, and on whom the novel’s action pivots (by promising an appearance on telly, Pirates lures to his house on an Essex estuary an assortment of egocentric media bores and pseuds, total ...”

“... of merit, nor of density, but of pace. If you read attempts by 19th-century English poets (Byron is something of an exception) to write poetic drama, and compare their lines with Shakespeare’s, the difference is all the more surprising because it’s so clear that Shakespeare was their model. Their lines are static where Shakespeare’s are ...”