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“... made for healthy children, Robert Edis argued in Decoration and Furniture of Town Houses (1881). Thomas Horsfall, a philanthropist and heir to a textiles fortune, agreed. Children form ‘habits of thought and feeling’, he wrote in an essay on ‘The Use of Pictures and Other Works of Art in Elementary Schools’ (1884), which ‘may afterwards be ...”

“... growth, like those of Madame de Sevigné, Madame du Deffand, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, Edward FitzGerald or indeed the great Swift himself. They bear the same relationship to such products as do those modern diaries like Crossman’s, written with malice aforethought and for publication, to the diaries of Pepys who did not mean to be read. This is ...”

“... back heroism to English Protestantism after some unfortunate hiccups during and after the reign of Edward VI. Mary spent her early years as the centre of attention, the heir apparent to the English throne. In 1525, at the age of nine, she was sent off to be the figurehead of Cardinal Wolsey’s revived experiment in government, the Council in the Marches. The ...”

“... addled Mary as the wellhead of wealth scarcely to be imagined is part of legend. To the admirable Thomas Cubitt goes the major credit for replacing Mary’s Thameside swamps with the patrician squares and terraces of Belgravia. Meanwhile John Nash, no foe to the rich, was erecting the haughty villas of Regent’s Park and designing a far finer Regent Street ...”

“... epitome of the treasure of health’, which drew on the work of the 15th-century alchemists Thomas Norton and George Ripley, who in turn were indebted to the formulations of Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Majorcan polymath. The key to alchemy was deep reading, between texts and across the ages. Keynes’s scrabbling about for Newton’s papers was as ...”

“... Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822. Shortly thereafter, Byron and Trelawny embarked for Greece, Mary Shelley’s troubled and troubling step-sister Claire Clairmont departed to become a governess in Russia, and in 1823 Mary and her last ...”

“... overriding economic considerations. The Foreign Office itself has comparatively little say. In Sir Edward Grey’s day, before 1914, it could operate without much regard for the other departments of government: now this autonomy has disappeared, and foreign policy is only one among several ways in which Britain seeks uneasily to find a way out of her economic ...”

“... ghastly, venal sister-in-law, seeing the growing attachment between Elinor and her brother, Edward, observes to Elinor’s mother that Edward must find a wealthy or noble wife. There will be trouble for ‘any young woman who attempted to draw him in’. The implication (Elinor is an unacceptable nobody and should lay ...”

“... sheep farmer, he is helped up the social ladder by the most socially mobile of all Tudor lawyers, Thomas Cromwell, yet he remains principled, modest and compassionate, a humanist in the modern as well as the Tudor sense. It’s significant that he is a hunchback, a painful disability that affects how others see him as well as his own view of himself. He weeps ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... women to rise above their sex and achieve parity with men. According to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, ‘every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven’ – a doctrine that transcends even as it reinforces the misogyny of classical culture. The legends of trans monks offer endless variations on a theme. St Pelagia (or Pelagios) had ...”

“... that has characterised my other short-term collecting crazes – the great Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford. To be more precise, when out driving, I have been going out of my way to visit engineering projects he was involved in designing or building. I came across the most recent addition to my collection in early October. I had driven through ...”

“... About ten years ago, I heard Edward Thompson give a public lecture at Harvard University. He was not then an internationally renowned spokesman for the peace movement: there was at that point no peace movement of any consequence to be a spokesman for. He was, however, one of the most influential historians of his time ...”

“... the English countryside, goes to school, and meets other children – in particular, the crippled Edward Campion. He also cures his grandmother, who suffers from nervous shakes. In Wiltshire Timothy loses touch with his father, but on leaving school he returns to London and discovers that Mr Harcombe, last seen living with Gloria Patterson, a young woman ...”

“... Prince Consort; still less the ‘feline skill’ of Sidney Lee who, disregarding the advice of Edward VII, ‘Stick to Shakespeare, Mr Lee, there’s money in Shakespeare,’ produced a double-decker biography of his late majesty; least of all the flippant irreverences of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, which caused George V to erupt with rage. On the ...”