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“... lived with her as his wife. By the time Lady Gregory told James these stories, her husband, Sir William Gregory, had been dead two years. Six weeks before his death, their friend, the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, whom the Gregorys had first met in Egypt in 1881, a year after their marriage, published in a new volume of poetry a group of what he called ‘A ...”

“... bought in the sales, and seemed never to acquire a handbag: acquaintances remember a trusty William Morris carrier, and she took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of ...”

“... and incoherent mix of Gibbon and Rousseau and Voltaire, stirred up with the modish radicalism of Godwin – none of which Coleridge ever cared for much. Nevertheless they had soon sorted out a plan for their lives. Equipped with a party of like-minded followers and wives, they would set up a communistic kibbutz on the banks of the Susquehannah river in ...”

“... simply the promotion of working-class interests by every possible means. He told the Chartist William Lovett: ‘I would neither stir hand nor foot to promote any public matter whatever which did not tend to their advantage.’ He expressed the emotional roots of this attitude in a letter to Samuel Rogers, in three sentences with a stirring cadence such ...”

“... man towards the end of the 1880s: He lived in a little house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegance that owed something to Whistler … I remember vaguely a white drawing-room with Whistler etchings, ‘let in’ to white panels, and a dining-room all white, chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped ...”

“... sought out Carlyle in Scotland to express his admiration. Now Carlyle met and disapproved of Lamb, Godwin, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review and Charles Buller were old friends, and Irving too, though Irving – now a popular preacher absorbed in miracle cures and speaking in tongues (‘hoo-ing and ha-ing’) – was making ...”

“... have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the end. ‘Dr Clark has prepared me for it – but I shall be but little able to bear it – even this my horrible situation I cannot bear to cease by the loss of him.’Severn meant no harm in packaging those five months with ...”