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“... three hundred years ago. After studying London hospital records covering nearly a century, Dr John Arbuthnot concluded that, in every year, more boys had been born than girls; each year on record was a ‘male year’. Why was this? We can imagine a mad style of reductionist explanation, accessible only to a prurient deity: describe the physical and ...”

“... scarcely a word of it; the wholly other and the all-too-human; the virgin ascetic who accused John Locke of trying to ‘embroil’ him with women, and the supreme London boulevardier whose consuming passions included Château Haut-Brion, the theatre and serial embroilments with women. Turn the page and the odd couple is joined by a third, for here ...”

“... as the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR): in effect, the Ministry for John Prescott, whose amour-propre demands a duly sprawling apanage. Mullin goes to Fenwick’s at his wife’s insistence, and buys three new suits. Early in 2001 he moves to International Development, only to get the heave-ho after Labour’s election win that ...”

“... stones. The anxiety present on every page is: would the paradox succeed? The reputation of Tom and Morgan is higher than her own? Brief despair – will she always be an outsider? Certainly Eliot and Forster had inner and outer selves, a persona which pretended, and an inner art which made life, made interest. And in October 1938 she is lamenting the fact that ...”

“... city sun. When my father felt depressed, he would visit the print room and look at a Dürer. The Morgan Library, the New York Academy of Medicine and Columbia’s rare book collections served those with more specialised needs.New York couldn’t compete with London or Paris: it had no bouquinistes, no Farringdon Road, no British Library or Bibliothèque ...”

“... Private Gardens of London. Written by a landscape gardener, and beautifully photographed by John Miller, the book’s focus is a series of nearly forty gardens from different parts of the metropolis. The Museum of London’s scheme to collect pictures and photographs of London gardens will surely result in a more representative sample, but this is a ...”

“... manual forty years later.’ There are occasional cross words – a fairly dignified row with John Lehmann and some bickering with Kingsley Martin. All this is more interesting than the political letters, at any rate as they are here represented, though there remains much to be said for Woolf’s ‘peculiar’ socialism, which was ...”

“... national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed to be the most vilified vested interest in the country. But from mid-century, unimagined national prosperity, assisted by Peelite finance, changed ...”

“... and rewarding job. He gravitated gently to Sydney, Australia, where he became a friend of the Rev. John McKnight, a rector in a slum area. Under McKnight’s influence, he moved towards Christian ideas. He liked the way McKnight applied his religion to the real world, and shared the rector’s horror of nuclear weapons. ‘Christians,’ said ...”

“... conspicuous failure as a writer is her lesbian novel, first published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan as The Price of Salt in 1952, then reprinted in 1991 under Highsmith’s own name as Carol. The cause of this failure is, paradoxically, that the novel comes too close to Highsmith’s real-life traumas and concerns: as long as she was compelled to ...”

“... acutely aware of their linguistic distinctiveness, signalled in the first edition of the Rev. John Jamieson’s influential Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published in 1808-09. Carlyle, the sage of Craigenputtock, had not stayed there, but in literary London he retained and exploited his outsider’s sense of his own alien speech and ...”

“... from procuring slaves for New Spain to Arctic whaling. (In a similar way, the Darien Company and John Law’s Mississippi Company had seduced the Scottish and French states into backing failed colonies.) The ‘Bubble Act’ of 1720 neither prevented the bursting of the South Sea Company’s bubble when its overvalued shares collapsed in price nor stopped ...”

“... especially to mark speakers from the lower classes. Complementary points are implied by the late John Thomas Low, writing on the wealth (or at least number) of modern historical plays in Scots – if you want to have Scots-speaking characters who are not peasants, you must go back in time – and by W.F.H. Nicolaisen, who shows how often novelists use ...”

“... decadence, and can’t be understood through the writings of Fabian intellectuals or the plays of John Galsworthy.Heffer isn’t interested in new scholarship on the period unless it’s biographical. Hardly a page of this book is informed by developments in historical thinking since the 1970s; he makes his case using whatever materials come to hand most ...”

“... who had died five years earlier. Submissions in 1955 were so dismal that he privately asked John Ashbery and O’Hara for manuscripts (Ashbery’s Some Trees was the winner).Rich and her fans have bristled at some of the condescending praise her early books received. Auden’s introduction to A Change of World (1951) characterised her poems as ‘neatly ...”