“... to editing the legal works. The result ranks among the greatest works of Victorian scholarship. Thomas Carlyle called it ‘the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy work I have ever met with in this generation’. Spedding received no payment for his vast labours, but was allowed to buy copies of the finished work at the trade price. He professed ...”

“... broke off the affair. Now, many months later, Bendrix bumps into Sarah’s husband on the Common. Henry Miles confides that he has doubts about Sarah’s fidelity, and has considered employing a private detective to follow her; Bendrix is inspired to have her watched himself. Parkis, the diligently incompetent investigator he hires, gets hold of Sarah’s ...”

“... on 20 May at the Duck and Drake, off the Strand, the lodgings of his cousin and the disciple, Thomas Wintour. Three other men were invited: Jack Wright, a swordsman friend of Catesby’s; Thomas Percy, Wright’s brother-in-law and man of business to his kinsman, the magnate and Councillor the Earl of ...”

“... animals and characters with funny names. I’m not wild about whimsy myself, and a first glance at Thomas Pynchon’s new novel had me worried. I could scarcely be surprised by the funny names or the animals, since Pynchon’s early fiction had people called Dennis Flange, Rachel Owlglass and Emory Bortz, and in Mason & Dixon there is a considerable speaking ...”

“... manuscript’, was discovered in the archives of Hereford Cathedral in 1907. The next year Arthur Thomas Bannister became a canon there. His appointment had been somewhat controversial: a man ‘of singular simplicity and directness’, he was known for his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly rose ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”