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“... at once be turned into facts. We should so learn them that words may become deeds. In Philology James Turner attempts a heroic defence of this misunderstood breed. He argues that philology lies at the heart of all the academic disciplines currently called ‘humanities’. He suggests that subjects as apparently diverse as ...”

“... Blake died a decade before Victoria came to the throne. I am bound therefore to think that James Turner (who ‘teaches history’, the back flap says, ‘at the University of Massachusetts, Boston’) is mistaken in his central thesis that the Victorians witnessed ‘the emergence of a new, distinctively modern sensibility’ about animals. His ...”

“... Reuben Brower for his allusive links to the tradition, Leo Damrosch for his imaginative modernism, James Turner for his ‘libertine self-fashioning’, Douglas Brooks-Davies for his concealed Jacobite allegory. In both these books, Pat Rogers displays an exemplary eclectic attention to Pope’s life and works, but no one scholar can hope to do justice to ...”

“... of Tyrants and Mountains, is the man who in 1975 was rescued from Idi Amin’s death squads by Mr James Callaghan, then Foreign Secretary, who flew to Uganda for that purpose. As a serving officer in World War Two and its immediate aftermath, Hills himself exercised what amounted to the power of life or death over thousands of persons who had ended the war on ...”

“... parachute that had failed.’ In September 1942, however, the real corpse of Paymaster Lieutenant James Turner, ‘with despatches in his pockets’, turned up in Spanish waters when his RAF seaplane crashed. The Spanish authorities, despite the Falangist government’s debt to the Axis for aiding its victory in the civil war, returned the body to the ...”

“... Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which ...”

“... Mr Turner is my favourite Edwardian. He sits in a chair under the window. He doesn’t waste a lot of words. And when he laughs he rocks a little. The sky is busy and blue over Richmond. Every few minutes a plane goes by. They seem to enter the window-frame just about head height; each one passes through the ears of E ...”

“... on the mob in the Gordon Riots, had another claim to notice. As a sheriff of London, Sir Barnard Turner was instrumental in abolishing Tyburn as a place of execution. In so doing he ended the tumultuous turnout of ruffians, whores and honest citizens who cheered, or execrated, the deathcart on its way from Newgate along Tyburn Road, now Oxford Street, to the ...”

“... and ‘in the last resort’ dealt ‘not with facts but with truth’. One thinks also of James Agate, who described not what happened but what he thought should have happened and called it ‘the higher truth’. Strachey, it seems, was not above inventing a ‘fact’ – he gave Dr Arnold short legs to make him look sillier. In Eminent Edwardians ...”

“... child was Georgiana’s (the event has echoes of the ‘warming-pan affair’ which embarrassed James II’s Queen). Having given her husband a long-wanted male heir, the Duchess naturally expected him to pay off her prodigious gambling debts. This he failed to do. Soon she became pregnant again, this time by a future prime minister, Earl Grey, who in years ...”

“... on to his young half-sister. For the most part, however, she was left to her own devices. Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ was partly based on the unsettled childhood of his friend John Singer Sargent, but he might as well have been describing Violet Paget’s youth. It was Mrs Sargent, encountered when Violet was ten, who became the first of a series ...”

“... its history, the directorship of Sydney Cockerell from 1908 to 1937. Cockerell, who followed M.R. James in the post, had been library cataloguer and acquisitions assistant to William Morris during the 1890s, and his taste was formed by Morris and Ruskin and their circles. He seems to have been relentlessly acquisitive, mostly on behalf of the Fitzwilliam, and ...”

“... that identifies Prince Eddy, the Queen’s first fiancé, as Jack the Ripper? Indeed it can. James Pope-Hennessy did not find room to discuss this matter in his 685-page life of Queen Mary published in 1959, possibly because the hue and cry after Prince Eddy had not then gained its full impetus, possibly for other reasons. What can Anne Edwards tell us ...”

“... Constable than the effects of art, more than the Claudian schema that served for Dedham Vale. With Turner, although he would have denied it, it was the other way about. At dinner with Samuel Rogers (who owned the Moonlight Landscape now in the Princes Gate Collection), Turner ‘broke out, to the annoyance of all, against ...”

“... life was an absolute mess. In his thorough and entertaining authorised biography of Cash, Steve Turner establishes a suitably saintly tone on the first page. ‘It was doubtful,’ he writes of his subject, ‘whether he had a bodily organ that hadn’t been operated on, an area of skin that hadn’t been gashed, or a significant bone that hadn’t been ...”