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“... George Saintsbury was in the taste business. By profession, he made judgments of taste on works of literature. He produced dozens of editions of the work of novelists and poets and more than 50 monographs, including A History of Elizabethan Literature, A History of English Prosody, The English Novel, A History of the French Novel and, self-referentially, books about books about books – A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, A History of English Criticism ...”

“... photographed by Cecil Beaton Runciman was born in 1903, one of the five children of Hilda and Walter Runciman, Liberal politicians who were the first married couple to sit simultaneously in Parliament. The considerable family fortune came from the shipping line founded by Walter’s father and the Runcimans’ five ...”

“... who have been responsible for swelling the canon. We start with the Scottish man of letters George Chalmers in 1790, and end up with Professor J.R. Moore of Indiana University, whose principal work extended from the 1930s to the 1960s. We learn of William Lee, sanitary reformer and colleague of Edwin Chadwick, who found his match in the equally ...”

“... are to be found in the Middle Ages among the fighting families of the Anglo-Scottish Border, as George MacDonald Fraser’s book The Steel Bonnets makes clear.* His synonymous reivers, raiders or riders used to get off their horses and play the football that became soccer and rugby, and they were not afraid of a few fouls: ‘some quarrel happened betwixt ...”

“... entries under Theresa, Marchioness of Londonderry, refer not to her, but to Frances Anne, while Walter Long appears as Robert. The Chartwell Papers are continually cited for quotations which appear in full in the Randolph Churchill/Martin Gilbert companion volumes, or even in the main volumes themselves. This unhelpful practice has been made positively ...”

“... and both are concerned with the ability of the small canvas to transform the large. So far, so George Eliot. But there’s also a hint in both novels of the other side of Dutch art – its preoccupation with death, obsession, loss of proportion. Patricia Dolan, the narrator of Weber’s ‘literary thriller’, is a middle-aged Irish-American art ...”

“... anniversary has been taken calmly by his countrymen: with far less celebration than, for instance, George Eliot received in 1980. There is to be no British Library exhibition (although they hold significant manuscripts); no plaque in the Abbey (although Trollope was more devout than the other novelist); no portrait stamp, no commemorative pillar-box at Waltham ...”

“... it seems. This was answered by demonstrations of extreme Protestantism that outdid any seen at St George’s in the East, Stepney. As a result, political life in Liverpool developed a unique complexity: the rival parties not only playing, as it were, up and down the field but across it. Philip Waller has set out to disentangle the confusions of Liverpool ...”

“... which produced a clash between Lords and Commons that prefigured the great row about the Lloyd George Budget in 1909. These financial restrictions dated back to 1712. In the early 18th century journalism was vituperative, venomous and virulent, as well as being frequently obscene and licentious. The reigns of William III and Queen Anne were marked by ...”

“... the Way, ‘I doe not lik this.’ Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it out, substituting: ‘a resnabell prity one’.In her will Wolfreston bequeathed her books to her son Stanford, on the condition that ‘he shall carefully keepe them ...”

“... in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered to liberate the National Liberal Club from its debts, hoping that he would in return be nominated for a peerage by Jeremy Thorpe. He removed most of the paintings and ...”

“... that the whole reappraisal is not serious. They would do well to recall the diffidence with which Walter Pater, initiating one of the most dramatic reappraisals in the history of taste, invited us to share his fascination with a neglected minor artist called Botticelli. In desperation, Rosen and Zerner point out that the recent exhibitions devoted to ...”

“... to the East India Company collection in London. Almost three decades passed. Then in 1845 Sir Walter Elliot of the Madras Civil Service travelled to Amaravati. The mound had almost entirely vanished, and ‘every fragment of former excavations had been carried away and burnt into lime’. However, Elliot dug the stupa’s north-west quadrant and removed ...”

“... English Man of Letters, someone who might have written the works of, say, Edmund Gosse, or Walter Besant. But a career is not a life. There was another private story in those earlier years – of a failed marriage and an unhappy wife, of childlessness and estrangement and despair. That story scarcely enters the letters, because Hardy was determined to ...”

“... on the 17th of that month. He had accompanied his Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington to visit the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had been discovered to have cancer during the week of the Suez war. Towards the end of the conversation, Dulles suddenly asked ‘Selwyn, why did you stop? Why ...”