“... Like​ the Wallace Collection in London, the Frick began life as a family house. In 1915, Henry Clay Frick bequeathed his Beaux-Arts limestone mansion on Fifth Avenue, along with its contents, to the city of New York. The Frick opened to the public as a museum in 1935, sixteen years after Frick’s death at the age of 69, and four years after that of his wife, Adelaide, at the age of 71 ...”

“... changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes begin to see universal manhood suffrage, equal representation for all ...”

“... unto his oth. Hit is pyté that he lyvyth!’ This indignant outburst by Sir Lancelot in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur has long been an embarrassment to admirers of the work and of its author. Ever since G.L. Kittredge, a hundred years ago, identified the author of Morte Darthur with Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold ...”

“... of English literary documents have stayed convicted. In two famous cases, those of the 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, who fabricated poems he attributed to a mythical 15th-century Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in ...”

“... from literature than unites them. In the Renaissance they were barely separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom ...”

“... at the door. This was the poem, ‘Fin de Fête’, which in 1916 attracted the attention of Thomas Hardy and convinced him of Charlotte Mew’s talent. Hardy, of course, didn’t need to be persuaded that the Spirit of the Universe was exacting, and Charlotte had the kind of temperament that accepted this without question, even in the nursery. In 1882 ...”

“... that persists in the 21st century: what is royalty to do with embarrassing and unwanted gifts? Henry III, fourth of his line, had become the brother-in-law of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who in a friendly gesture sent him three magnificent wildcats, possibly leopards. These creatures of fearful symmetry were the very stuff of heraldry, but their ...”

“... life? ‘I knew from the start that I was out for Glory,’ he wrote in that essay. ‘Unlike Henry Adams’ – the writer Vidal fondly compares his own work to – ‘I got out at 17, and vowed that if I was not elected to anything, I would not come back to live in the capital when there were so many other worlds and glories elsewhere.’ He hasn’t ...”

“... politics of northwestern Europe for generations. Aged eight, he was betrothed to Mary, daughter of Henry VII of England, France’s other old enemy. (Like so much in the wavering alliance between England and Burgundy over the centuries, this planned marriage eventually ran into the sand.)By the age of 19, Charles had come into his inheritance. Co-ruler of ...”

“... he weighed 11 st. He was heaviest in 1809 (11 st 5 lbs), lightest two years later (9 st 11 lb). Henry Angelo was a fencing master and the author of a memoir about his friends and his father, Domenico, a Tuscan swordfighting legend who had moved to London and started a fencing and equestrian school in Soho. Fencing matches were yet another way to ...”

“... for wrapping vegetables at Bucklersbury Market, or drugs at the apothecary’s, or (according to Henry Fitzgeffrey) ‘to dry Tobacco in’. ‘Great Iulius Commentaries lies and rots,’ the poet and waterman John Taylor wrote, ‘as good for nothing but stoppe mustard pots.’ Sir William Cornwallis kept ‘pamphlets and lying-stories and two-penny ...”

“... Boston and immediately concluded that William James should marry her. In one version of the story, Henry James Sr returned from a meeting and announced to those at home that he had seen William’s future bride. Another version attributes the discovery to the philosopher Thomas Davidson, who invited his friend to meet ‘the ...”

“... reality. The Preface to the reprint begins:I found Mary Ellen Meredith’s letters to her lover Henry Wallis hidden in a paint box under a bed at Vera and Cliff Whiting’s house in Purley, Surrey, in 1970 or so. The Whitings had only recently moved in; they had inherited the house intact with all its jumble in the box room. ‘Go ahead and look in ...”

“... and eloquently, declared in his ‘Art poétique’ of 1874. The line must have lodged in Edward Thomas’s mind: in May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his ...”

“... leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar.”’ Carnegie might well have wondered whether Thomas Mellon, in passing on his huge fortune to his son Andrew, had not bestowed on him a curse rather than a blessing. The two families made their fortunes in Pittsburgh after emigrating in the first half of the 19th century: the Mellons from County Tyrone in ...”