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“... built of solid dark mahogany and pictures of dead animals.’ A Secret Service chief disappears in Joseph Hone’s The Flowers of the Forest and ambiguous allegiances are disentangled in a quest across Europe, as well as back in time to the Cambridge of Philby – actually, to a stop on the Oxford to Cambridge line, on the assumption that Oxford, too, had ...”

“... style of censorship and another, as prior restraint gave way to prosecution after the fact. Or as Joseph Hone puts it in his enthralling microhistory, in 1695 ‘the current system of pre-publication censorship was replaced by a new one of post-publication censorship.’ For a line of writers from Defoe to Bentham, it wasn’t a change for the ...”

“... tempted to over-compensate with self-conscious bursts of local colour. This is the trap into which Joseph Hone has fallen in his Children of the Country. He has some excuse, perhaps, in that he was frustrated in his original purpose, which was to cross the African continent from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, following as closely as possible the route ...”

“... or gildedly I allude to it all my knowing readers will instantly understand just what I mean.’As Joseph Hone shows in Alexander Pope in the Making, Pope began his writing life as a predominantly manuscript poet writing for ‘tight-knit recusant networks’ in the Thames Valley. Hone argues that for the early part of ...”

“... anything at all about its having taken the liberty of expunging them. Again, though the memoir by Joseph Hone is extremely good, and has done better than wear well (it has weathered well), there is now something needlessly frustrating about all the excisions and truncations; forty years on, these letters could and should have been re-edited. The ...”

“... Adrian Frazier’s painstakingly researched new biography of Moore marks a considerable advance on Joseph Hone’s respectful but pedestrian 1936 standard biography and Tony Gray’s lively but unscholarly 1996 Life. Moore was born in 1852 into the West of Ireland ‘hard-riding country gentry’ idolised by Yeats. His childhood playgrounds were the ...”

“... put more than a thousand individual fakes into circulation. It was forgery on an industrial scale.Joseph Hone’s hugely entertaining new account shows how this ‘Moriarty of the book world’ met his match in a duo of intrepid young book dealers, John Carter and Graham Pollard, whose investigation is ‘worthy of fiction’. The ‘impossibly ...”

“... and more gratefully. But if so they did not come forward, at least not in the press. Then​ Joseph Hone undertook the Life and appealed in the Times. I wrote to him, but guardedly, and before I could say fully what I wanted to say I became very seriously ill. I recovered and had another chance yet still I did not say it. I don’t know why, except ...”

“... decided to mount an exhibition at her own expense of his work and that of the artist Nathaniel Hone. The reviews were good, as was attendance at the show. John Butler Yeats was becoming famous in Dublin, but he was still broke: he stayed on in the city only because he did not have the fare to return to London. But gradually his studio in St Stephen’s ...”

“... in a very particularised way. Its heroes are the popular rhetoricians Paine, Cobbett, Spence and Hone; its leading theorist, John Horne Tooke. A book concerned with so many minor figures may seem discouragingly narrow, not perhaps to political and social historians, but to most critics, even those who specialise in Romanticism or in language in the aftermath ...”

“... to Maud Gonne, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his authorised biography of the poet, published in 1942. When Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel ...”

“... artist with ambitions beyond contemporary expectations. Her father, the Austrian painter Johann Joseph Kauffman, encouraged her talents, giving her an artistic, literary and musical education to which few women had access. After chaperoning her around Italy, he followed her to London, helping to manage her career as it far eclipsed his own. Even her name ...”

“... they record and much of their vocabulary must date from centuries after Phalaris. He began to hone his own distinctive style, that of an infinitely learned man whose spirit was entirely untainted by generosity: ‘A strange piece of stupidity, or else contempt of his Readers,’ he growled, ‘to pretend to assume the garb and person of Phalaris, and yet ...”

“... small portrait copied from a very small photograph of a young woman named, so Mossy averred, Nora Joseph Barnacle. A name, I need not tell you, well known by then throughout the world of literature.’ ‘Barnacle?’ said Hunty. ‘But that is a kind of goose.’ ‘Mossy’s story about it was that some ten years before, that is in 1922, a tiddley old ...”

“... Katz renders this by ‘Cynthia, potent form: light word, Cynthia’. As early as 1577 Joseph Scaliger had argued that this line was not just the product of an utterly obscure poet (‘poeta obscurissima’) but was in need of emendation because the neuter plural verba (‘words’) did not make grammatical sense. He had a point. Modern editors ...”