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“... special was the composition of the Liverpool electorate in its changing form. Religion, or, as Waller’s title has it, sectarianism, was a more influential factor than in any other great city of the 19th century. Liverpool had long been distinguished by its Protestantism, partly maybe in reaction to the Roman Catholicism which was still strong in the ...”

“... two maids, a cook, a gardener, a houseman-cum-assistant gardener and eventually a chauffeur. As Philip Waller remarks in his extraordinary compendium of turn-of-the-century literary life in Britain, ‘Corelli’s sense of grandeur was the inverse of her sense of the absurd.’ He doesn’t stint his illustration of the point: A daily ritual was her ...”

“... On the eve of World War Two, Fats Waller was, after Louis Armstrong, the jazz musician and jazz entertainer best known and most loved by the American and English populations at large. In recent years, however, Waller’s reputation has declined, possibly because the jazz canon has room for only one cut-up: Armstrong ...”

“... authorities on specialist topics to write essays which provide a synthesis of their research. Philip Norton (who made his name writing about dissident Conservative MPs long before nature imitated art and this became such a fashionable activity) proves a lucid and well-informed guide to the workings of the Parliamentary party. Richard Kelly usefully ...”

“... century, the Royal Society established a committee including Dryden, John Evelyn and Edmund Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of the language in his ...”

“... of poet-critics is that they are crypto-specialists, and know the kind of poetry they want.) Is Waller always slant, or Crabbe, or Whitman? On the last of these Hollander writes convincingly, yet leaves a doubt whether indirection is, for him, quite the main thing. In some of the best passages, Hollander brings home afresh the sheer extraordinariness and ...”

“... of John Aubrey’s 17th-century writing. ‘My great Uncle … remembred him,’ Aubrey wrote of Philip Sidney, dead for three generations, ‘and sayd that he was wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plaines, to take his Table booke out … and write downe his notions as they came into his head when he was writing his Arcadia.’ Searching for memories ...”

“... up of the trust of two of her grand-daughters, one of whom was married to Thomas Wharton, son of Philip, Baron Wharton, the Nonconformists’ champion in the House of Lords and John Owen’s patron. Her son, the poet Rochester, was a supporter of Buckingham, was listed by Shaftesbury as ‘worthy’, and despite repeated bouts of severe illness served on the ...”