“... her distant new husband, ‘so Instead of Dressing showily, or behaving usefully – I sate at home and wrote Verses.’ But Thrale wasn’t impressed and Johnson stepped into the void, translating the Odes of Boethius in alternate verses with his hostess and helping to publish the poetry (most famously a popular ballad, ‘The Three Warnings’) that ...”

“... to land ownership, which persists in a more democratic form in the national obsession with home ownership, overrode every other concern, then as now with mixed results. Despite threats to the preservation of Hadrian’s Wall and Stonehenge, both Houses of Parliament fiercely resisted the first Ancient Monuments Protection Bill, which took nine years ...”

“... instance, I was reassured to find myself not alone in feeling like this. On the death of Crabbe Lord Melbourne wrote: ‘I am always glad when one of those fellows dies for then I know I have the whole of him on my shelf.’ Which is, of course, the cue for biography.This is the fifth play on which Nicholas Hytner and I have collaborated, not counting two ...”

“... it could be something private, hidden in a locket worn next to your heart. In his autobiography, Lord Herbert of Cherbury recounts how his admirer, Lady Ayres, had a full-size portrait of him ‘contracted into little form’, and wore it round her neck ‘so low that she hid it under her breasts’. Trouble ensued when her husband found her lying in ...”

“... Woman’s Breasts & Bum”’. The following day, Salmond gave a press conference near his home town, Linlithgow, describing the investigation as ‘flawed and bereft of natural justice’. Last year, Woman B told me she spent that weekend trawling social media. ‘Not a word of a lie, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep or drink anything,’ she ...”

“... and derogatory remarks about Negroes’ and he was stoned by classmates on his way home. During his freshman year at Columbia he was denied a dorm room and excluded from contributing to the college newspaper. And, as he pointed out to his increasingly impatient accusers (‘Could you make it briefer, please?’ Cohn interjects at one point), he ...”

“... the only stations that would play the new dance music being made by Black artists, Kiss FM was home to many of the best DJs of the era, including Danny Rampling and the future Radio 1 star Trevor Nelson. But the pirate radio scene was a Wild West of stolen transmitters and police raids, and McNamee wanted legitimacy. With enormous effort, Kiss managed to ...”

“... Africa and the St Lawrence Valley. And it prevailed in Delhi in 1876, when the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, laid on a week-long feast for 68,000 officials and maharajas (‘the most colossal and expensive meal in world history’, according to Mike Davis) while 100,000 people died of starvation in Mysore and Madras. Lytton blamed the Great Famine of ...”

“... of thousands of refugees. Imagine then his and his government’s delight when Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen proposed to restore the outline of the 1939 settlement almost exactly. A quarter of the republic’s territory for 17 per cent of the population! And the right quarter at that: the historic ethnic space of western Herzegovina and Posavina. The arid ...”

“... a seductive glamour about the squires going off to war, and a potent sorrow when they did not come home. But though Johnston can be impersonal about himself, he cannot be that way about his brother. The poem tries to find outlets for grief in several different formal schemes, including blank verse. The stiff upper lip relaxes, leaving eloquence ...”

“... itself. The Folger, the establishment of which guaranteed America’s pre-eminence as a home for Shakespearean textual studies, is only the most spectacular example of the trend for that country’s 19th and early 20th-century capitalists to make F1 a high-prestige bequest to their fellow-citizens – or, to put it more cynically, a commodity of ...”

“... of his friends and patrons in the Young England movement. As the creator of Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Frederick Verisopht, not to mention the Lady Flabella, Dickens must have had to swallow hard before praising this hymn to nobility. The next time Dickens tried his hand at art criticism was nearly five years later, on 15 June 1850, when he published a ...”

“... Conrad, who had landed in Singapore in 1883 after himself being forced to abandon ship, to write Lord Jim. As a steam rather than a sailing ship, the Jeddah was itself a small part of the transformations which affected the calculations of economy, means of transport and time that Muslim pilgrims (then usually referred to by the British as ...”

“... Mohawk Indians), Forrest played a noble American savage up against the English, notably the evil Lord Fitzarnold. Its sub-Ossianic script gives a vivid impression both of the bare-chested, full-bodied acting that was Forrest’s stock-in-trade and of some of the sentiments that would animate the Astor Place rioters: If ye love the silent spots where the ...”