“... It is a daunting thought, particularly as no one seems ever to have thrown away a letter from Thomas or Jane: the libraries of the world are stuffed with them. Yet I have no doubt at all that this mammoth editorial task is very well worth doing, and it is being done extremely well. The Carlyles were extraordinary human beings and, as it ...”

“... are familiar with this sort of retrospective chronicling. Putin’s treatise looks very like Henry VIII’s justification for invading a sovereign, neighbouring state in his Declaration, containing the just causes and considerations of this present war with the Scots (1542). The medieval legends and hints of trinitarian theology in Putin’s narrative ...”

“... in pronouncing on the answers. Those are fiction’s strengths, though Crichton, who has described Henry James as ‘trivial’, would no doubt disagree. On the other hand, an informed argument about the benefits and dangers of new kinds of scientific research and the ways they should be funded and controlled isn’t helped by an unintentionally hilarious ...”

“... and rancour. There is evidence that he enjoys walking, curlews, turtledoves, bullfinches, owls, Thomas Moore’s ‘Thee, Thee, Only Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my ...”

“... also known as Roland le Fartere, must be near the top of the list. An entertainer who worked for Henry II, Roland is recorded in several medieval registers as holding substantial tracts of land north of Ipswich. His yearly service to the king, at least as it has come down to us, was ‘saltum, siflum et pettum’: a jump, a whistle and a fart.Roland fits ...”

“... Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Love Peacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.’ But alongside the blessings, kicks and curses is a running lament ...”

“... of Scotland’s rulers, led an army of unusual size and quality into northern England. The young Henry VIII had embarked on a military expedition in northern France, and Scotland responded to French calls for aid by invading England. James IV’s army was equipped with an impressive number of modern cannon cast in bronze and was accompanied by Continental ...”

“... lynching, a hodgepodge of offences, large and small, against the niceties of racial domination: Henry Bedford lynched for ‘talking disrespectfully to a young white man’; Jesse Thornton for ‘addressing a white police officer without the title “mister”’; Malcom Wright for ‘yielding too little of the roadway to a white man as he passed in his ...”

“... been six months in London before the Times had devoted a leader to his work. In that year, 1890, Henry James had termed him ‘the star of the hour’; R.L. Stevenson had pronounced him ‘too clever to live’; and Tennyson had judged him ‘the only one ... with the divine fire’. Nine years later, news of his illness had taken precedence in London over ...”

“... Clarke. Elizabeth and Mary were obsessed with each other. Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII; her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor. While most of Europe thought of Elizabeth as a bastard – how could a daughter of Anne Boleyn be otherwise? – Mary was as legitimate as ...”

“... feeble: in 1509 they were conspicuous for not being among the 48 companies which took part in Henry VII’s funeral procession. By the 1530s, though, things were perking up, at least if we take the seating plan for a lord mayor’s feast as a marker of prominence in the City: four stationers shared a table with a mix of ...”

“... of Athens invites adaptation because it is already a collaboration – it was partly written by Thomas Middleton, who composed its city comedy-like scenes – and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius ...”

“... 1486, eight months after Richard III’s death at the Battle of Bosworth, the ‘Lancastrian’ Henry VII set out with all the usual pomp and pageantry on a progress through his new kingdom. Before visiting York, Richard’s northern stronghold, Henry sent instructions ahead telling the citizens how he was to be ...”

“... in late August or early September 1617, came the eccentric English author, polyglot and traveller Thomas Coryate. He was a smallish, bearded man with a long, rather lugubrious face – ‘the shape of his head’, according to one description, was ‘like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before’. He wore simple native clothes, and was thin to the ...”

“... and civic libraries emerged after the traumatic dispersal of monastic libraries under Henry VIII: the Bodleian opened in 1602; Sion College was founded in 1630 for Anglican clergy; Humphrey Chetham’s public library in Manchester, which still bears his name, opened in 1653; and there were new town libraries in Ipswich (1599), Norwich (1608) and ...”