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“... benevolence like unpleasant medicine’ came under heavy fire in 19th-century literature. David Herbert’s unpretentious little book, which is written almost entirely from primary sources and is local history at its best, deals with Byron’s widow in her Lady Bountiful role. Lady Byron certainly did quite a lot for the village of Earl Shilton ...”

“... that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial detail. In either case, historiography is given the task that Wordsworth assigned to poetry: to reconcile the seemingly unrelated worlds ...”

“... that dispose one somewhat more against Tennant. Philip Hoare relates one, as told by the Hon. David Herbert, about his treatment of the actress Margaret Rutherford. He cultivated her assiduously – even, more or less, proposing marriage to her – and she fell for his charms, and then when one day she came to his house for the weekend, he quite ...”

“... son by throwing a sharpening-steel at him in a fit of rage (the boy was the same age as his cousin David Herbert). Might it not have been male violence, as much as maternal discontent, that made Lawrence ‘abnormal’? Lawrence, like his father and uncle, was given to wild fits of rage. When confronted with nothing more threatening than a blank sheet of ...”

“... Belfast, in 1972, Heaney planned to record some poems and songs with his friend, the singer David Hammond. While they were on their way to the studio, a number of bombs exploded in the city: casualties were reported. Hammond decided not to perform: ‘the very notion of beginning to sing at that moment when others were beginning to suffer seemed like an ...”

“... readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters (the other one is Burne-Jones) is a more languid affair, but it usefully brought Cecil’s own Romantic instincts to bear on a painter whose inspiration was often professedly ...”

“... is heard to mutter: ‘You’ll be wanting the gold fillings out of their teeth next.’ 2) The David Irving libel trial in February. Reading from the transcript of an interview with Irving on Australian television, Richard Rampton QC, barrister for the defence, asks why Irving had said that the idea of black men playing cricket for England made him feel ...”

“... books and the database of slaving voyages compiled in the 1990s by a group of historians headed by David Eltis and Herbert Klein. It ranges from the counting houses of Liverpool and Bristol to the ‘factories’ (slave-trading outposts) of West Africa and the slave markets of the Caribbean. The book is episodic and ...”

“... Party in Scotland. Balls’s wife, Yvette Cooper, sits with him in cabinet. Miliband’s brother, David, is foreign secretary. Brothers and sisters, husbands and wives: the Brown government is a family affair, and it marks a shift to ever more intimate political relationships at the centre of power, even compared to the days when Tony Blair was ruling the ...”

“... frequently) for its alternately faux-naif and overreaching prose. He followed it in 2007 with Miss Herbert, a vagrant disquisition on the nature of style in the novel that had the feel of a lot of flashy undergraduate essays determinedly tacked together to make a passably book-like structure. But the source material was smart enough (it was often very clever ...”

“... those who support Save Britain’s Heritage know only too well. We live in a retrospective age and David Lowenthal’s discursive study is a product of it. One of the attractions of this book is that it enables the Melton Constables of the world to be seen in the context of the future as well as the past. David Lowenthal is ...”

“... their personal lives. ‘Though Judge Mellon had rebelled decisively against his own father,’ David Cannadine writes in his new biography of the judge’s son Andrew, ‘he had no intention of tolerating any such conduct in the next generation … The judge regarded his sons as essentially extensions of himself.’ When Andrew Mellon was in his teens, his ...”

“... to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith. I would think a life of diverse affections could be made upon such affiliations. But Grigson seems to need to be ...”

“... It is surprising because, although social anthropology, under the influence of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, first developed as a kind of grand-scale, synthetic history in which the data of ethnography were used as illustrations of a priori theories of social evolution or historical diffusion, it later developed into a self-consciously non-historical ...”

“... miscellaneous essays by MacCarthy, all of which have been collected before, and a memoir by Lord David Cecil, of which a portion appeared as preface to an earlier selection. Desmond MacCarthy was probably the best-known London literary journalist of his time, and it is clearly the view of publisher and editor that his influence can be extended into our ...”