“... 15 October. Shot in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire; became part of the collection of the Rev. Thomas Gisborne of Staffordshire, known for his 1797 book, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. Exhibited, along with a Baillon’s crake, at a meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastlein 1828; drawn by the engraver ...”

“... was a conventionally ‘manly’ king. The charge that Richard was immature was made explicitly by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, in the sermon he preached on Richard’s deposition in 1399. There he contrasted the ‘boy’, Richard, with his supplanter, the ‘man’, Henry IV. He also elaborated on the childlike characteristics that rendered ...”

“... of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, had read that the skull of Sir Thomas Browne, antiquary, lover of mysteries, connoisseur of odds and ends, was kept in the museum of that same hospital. He failed to find it, or the museum, and it turned out that the skull had subsequently been buried with the rest of Browne’s body in the ...”

“... his cause and urged the queen to make him her attorney-general. When that office fell to his rival Edward Coke, he set his sights on the solicitor-generalship, but with an equal lack of success. Bacon had offended Elizabeth I by his opposition in Parliament to some of her financial demands and Essex was a tactless supplicant. In a well-intentioned but almost ...”

“... a nature a little lower than that of angels and assumed by far higher than they,’ according to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in ...”

“... language were ruder and less polished than those of their Continental counterparts. The translator Thomas Hoby called for writers to translate important works in order to enrich their own language, so that ‘we alone of the worlde maye not bee styll counted barbarous in our tunge, as in time out of minde we have bene in our maners’. For Hoby and his ...”

“... is this odd fish?’ Severn also asked, and Crane’s book is an attempt to answer that question. Edward John Trelawny was born in 1792 and died in 1881. In his later years he was a legendary figure, farouche and craggy, a solitary survivor from an epoch which already seemed fabulously remote: here, living on deep into the later Victorian age was a man who ...”

“... keen sense of what her characters did next was revealed by her nephew and early biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh. He reported that Austen told her family: ‘Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell about two years.’Most readers of Austen’s fiction feel instinctively that her heroines ...”

“... music dramas staged. This is clearly what moved and impressed exceptional Wagnerians like Proust, Thomas Mann and Mallarmé. It is precisely Wagner’s extremely varied legacy – a legacy which includes Toscanini, Boulez, Schoenberg, and critical critics like Deathridge, Nattiez and Adorno – that Paul Rose’s book attempts to refute. Not that his book ...”

“... Thomas Grant’s​ Court Number One tells the stories of 11 prominent trials heard in Court One of the Old Bailey between 1907, when it opened, and 2003. His aim is to use these stories as illustrations of ‘British sensibilities and preoccupations over the last hundred years … Through the criminal trials … there can be traced at least one version of the history of social and moral change over the last century ...”

“... in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to look forward to.’ ‘Suffolk is supremely and unassailably isolated,’ Julian Tennyson wrote in Suffolk Scene. ‘It is a country for the individualist, for the explorer and lover of ...”

“... Arthur Benson​ never stopped dreaming about his father. Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped dead saying the Confession in 1896 – he sank onto his prayer cushion and didn’t get up again – but nearly twenty years later his son found him crouched in the cupboard under the stairs, dressed in his purple cassock and playing with some toys: ‘Papa … giggled; then he said: “But now that you have found me out, you must run down here as often as you can, and we will have a good game at something – You don’t know what fun it is ...”

“... of the first Reform Bill was made by the young MP for the rotten Wiltshire borough of Calne, Thomas Babington Macaulay. He denounced the aristocracy’s blind insensitivity to the upper middle classes from which he came. He stressed the contribution that class could and should make to politics. It was precisely the urgent need to keep the barbarians ...”

“... of 1965, which presented both Latin and English texts along with magisterial introductions by Edward Surtz and J.H. Hexter. For Surtz (a Jesuit), More was very much Saint Thomas; for Hexter (a Whig), he was more clearly Sir Thomas, and their rival interpretations have challenged ...”

“... at that time his friend. What sort of man, he had asked Erasmus, was this kindred poetic spirit Thomas More, fellow-condemner of court life and author of the diverting Utopia, as well as admirably an admirer of Hutten’s own satire on monkish blankness and obscurantism, Letters from Nonentities (Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum)? Erasmus’s reply did for More ...”