“... they were published with immense success in 1590 as illustrations (engraved by Theodor de Bry) to Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia – suggests that what was made as a record was used as advertising. The Report was issued in German, Latin and French editions as well as in English. That Harriot and White’s book was ...”

“... When Thomas Jefferson was introduced as the new American Ambassador to France in 1784, legend has it that the French minister asked if he was Benjamin Franklin’s replacement, and Jefferson replied that he was merely Franklin’s successor; no one could replace him. Whether or not the story is true, it conveys Franklin’s stature as the only serious rival to George Washington for the title of America’s greatest hero of the age ...”

“... The Governesses, published in France in 1992, began as a short story.* Even now it comes to little more than a hundred pages. Three governesses, ‘mistresses of games and pleasures’, are employed to entertain the four young sons of the Austeur family. Although they have individual names (Eléonore, Laura and Inès), the governesses work as one. When they ...”

“... Founded by private subscription in 1841, the London Library was the brainchild of Thomas Carlyle, a serious man. For its 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him ...”

“... He had come to announce a plan ‘to revitalise history’s place in our schools’. ‘Nothing is more important to the survival of the British nation,’ he declared, ‘than an understanding among its young of our shared heritage and the nature of the struggles, foreign and domestic, which have secured our freedoms.’ We cannot be surprised that some ...”

“... form of death – drowning, say, on the way to Malta, or an intestinal catastrophe still more catastrophic than the ones which figured in the psychosomatic melodrama of his life – there is a widespread feeling that it would have been better for all concerned, better even for Coleridge himself, had he simply ceased to exist during the first years of ...”

“... reprinted in Dublin, unchanged, only as an afterthought’. A rash of Tatler imitators gave way to more nationally minded miscellanies by the mid-century, but the first golden age of the Irish magazine was the 1790s. Journals such as Anthologia Hibernica and the Microscope confidently addressed the world of Addisonian Enlightenment and gentlemanly ...”

“... take the place of Battleship Potemkin, which was always very boring. And here is another poll of more urgent interest. Forty per cent of Church of England clergy support unilateral nuclear disarmament, 49 per cent support what is laughably called the nuclear deterrent and 11 per cent are undecided – blessed followers of St ...”

“... to space – as any of the artists.In 1994 Wright made way for Michael Govan, a protégé of Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Museum. By this time, Dia had acquired nearly seven hundred works, and to show this collection needed more space than the real-estate market in Manhattan would allow. From a plane ...”

“... he gives the impression of looking for something to grab an audience which would have been more edified by something less melodramatic. His two worthiest predecessors in 15th-century Italy did not seek to be so sensational: the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena had evoked the traditional virtue of peacemaking in a population given to feud; the Dominican ...”

“... acquiring knowledge. In the words of Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, Qazwini’s near contemporary, ‘the more one contemplates and the more informed one is of the wonders, rarities and marvels behind the actions of all created things, the more one’s knowledge reaches perfection and wisdom ...”

“... Delta has been the most vicious variant so far, with a Spike that allows it to enter cells more efficiently and brush off some antibodies. The strange Spikes of Epsilon, Zeta, Eta etc all passed by without great alarm, none of them able to compete with the Delta variant. There were worries that the next serious variant might be a descendant of ...”

“... their achievements. And these particular achievements are not just some of the funniest or even more self-aware of films. They are also a genre, and are about something. They are about marriage. More exactly, Cavell suggests, they are about remarriage. But marriage ‘is the central social image of human change’. And ...”

“... Surtees or Trollope, tended to give minutely-detailed accounts of country-house life, which were more precise than rhapsodic. But during the first half of this century attitudes changed, and one of the most common set-pieces in popular fiction became that magical, glamorous, enchanted moment when the hero or heroine first set eyes upon the mansion which ...”

“... disaster: ‘negligently played’ at the Blackfriars Theatre, according to its title page, ‘and more squeamishly beheld’. The actors were hissed off stage, but Jonson, possessed of what the Renaissance scholar Joseph Loewenstein has called a ‘bibliographic ego’, was not a man to walk away. The printed text of 1631 includes sustained criticism of the ...”