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“... to Horace Walpole; the Countess of Belvidere, after her imprisonment in Ireland for adultery; Lady Elizabeth Foster, mistress of the Duke of Devonshire and bosom friend of his Duchess; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was drawn to Italy by her love for the ambidextrous Francesco Algarotti and then took up with a Brescian count who swindled her; the free-thinking ...”

“... in public discourse. And there’s plenty of that silencing still going on. We need only think of Elizabeth Warren being prevented a few weeks ago from reading out a letter by Coretta Scott King in the US Senate.1 What was extraordinary on that occasion wasn’t only that she was silenced and formally excluded from the debate (I don’t know enough about the ...”

“... level, Mansfield’s was a model career and Samuel Smiles wrote of him with reverence. His wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was devotedly married for 46 years, was the daughter of an earl and the granddaughter of a lord chancellor. A dutiful but not excessively devout Anglican, he prospered at the bar, then entered Parliament and almost at once was appointed ...”

“... file.’ The only blot on Wyatt’s record was his marriage to the daughter of a Kentish baron, Elizabeth Brooke. We do not know if it was a match of love or strategy, but we do know that the partnership was a failure, and ended in Elizabeth being cast off. The gossip at court was that ‘laquelle il avoit chassee de la ...”

“... of the populace, must remember, that their insolence in peace is bravery in war.’ Hurrah! As Elizabeth Einberg puts it, The March of the Guards to Finchley is ‘a work that aims to be both “serious and comic” in the fullest Hogarthian sense’. However reprehensible the behaviour of the grenadiers, the painting permits us to enjoy their ...”

“... private library in England in his house in Mortlake (his diary records regular visits from Queen Elizabeth, as well as promises of money from her). We tend now to see him not as the magus who turns base metals into gold in the course of Crowley’s tetralogy, but as a kind of knowledge broker who sold his learning to aid historical research and pragmatic ...”

“... life had openly censured Mr Cecil Parkinson and suggested he should resign: two Tory MPs, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and the Mayor of Potters Bar. Ranged against this lone and motley quartet were the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the Chairman of the Conservative Party, most of Fleet Street, 70 Tory MPs, 62 per cent of the British public, Bernard ...”

“... correspondence, a remnant of which was acquired by Sir Robert Cotton? Where are the papers of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More? Perhaps the former kept none; the latter, practising his famous discretion, very likely destroyed his in the months during which, still free, he could confidently look forward to his arrest. Of course, there are scattered items ...”

“... the Strand had become a magnet to the discontented, he believed that the rivals who now commanded Elizabeth’s favour were bent not only on manipulating the Queen to their advantage and the nation’s disadvantage, but on his own destruction. Only a pre-emptive strike, he concluded, could save him. On Sunday, 8 February, he set out to raise the city of ...”

“... claim to the title to understand the tensions which were at stake. Already by the reign of Elizabeth I, it was recognised that a university MA made a man a gentleman, whatever his pedigree might be. That is the assumption on which today’s educational system is built: it is choosing the gentlemen (and the ladies also) of the next generation’s social ...”

“... and the incarnationalist and Christian-socialist teachings of Lamennais and Frederick Maurice). Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (1857) dismissed Comte’s doctrines as intrinsically ‘absurd’; yet the poem centred on the heroic tragedy of a man who practised the supreme positivist virtue of ‘altruism’ or ‘sacrifice for others’, at the ...”

“... bystander and suggested he run along the deck to see if any stray pieces of ice had come on board. Elizabeth Eustis and Martha Eustis Stevenson, sisters from Haverford, Pennsylvania, travelling first-class, were asleep in their cabin. The collision, though almost soundless – ‘like tearing a strip of calico, nothing more’ – woke them up. ...”

“... and services on one side and family apartments on the other.The Renaissance finally arrived during Elizabeth’s reign. She was less greedy for buildings than her father and was a patron by proxy, shrewdly encouraging ambitious courtiers to build glamorous houses for her entertainment, rather than paying for them herself. When she gave Kenilworth Castle to her ...”

“... and changed in exactly the same manner. Davie has no other reason to offer as to why he finds Bishop Ken’s hymn inferior, save that it appeals to sentimental associations (described in a Kipling story) which Davie dismisses as ‘mawkish’. One is left on one’s own to decide why Davie really dislikes Ken’s hymn. Perhaps it is because of a certain ...”

“... conversed with you, he look’t into your very thoughts.’ That the corpse of Robert Braybrook, bishop of London (d. 1404) ‘was like a preserved fish: uncorrupted except for the ears and pudenda’. (Aubrey visited after the roof of St Paul’s fell in during the 1666 fire, causing the lead coffins to break open.) Most audible of all, perhaps, is ...”