“... 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 ...”

“... an honorary post without pay or duties. In 1577 he received an analogous courtesy appointment from Henry of Navarre, the Huguenot leader who would become Henry IV of France. Montaigne was proud of these honours. The title page of his 1580 edition of the Essays reads: Essais de Messire Michel Seigneur de Montaigne, Chevalier ...”

“... War began, the West was full of enablers and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ...”

“... and Betteris’), plus The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Othello and probably the two Henry IV plays (listed as ‘The Hotspurr’ and ‘Falstaff’). Also listed are four plays by Fletcher, all collaborations with Francis Beaumont, including two performances of Philaster. The dates of the performances are not specified, but it is likely that ...”

“... representatives of a new species in the American landscape, the ‘libertarian intellectual’. Henry James had foreseen the type in The Bostonians in the character of Basil Ransom, proud ex-Confederate contributor to the Rational Review, full of passionate intensity about how to harmonise hierarchy and freedom. The Buckleys’ favoured ideas-and-values man ...”

“... struck by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why ...”

“... to the failure of the Amicable Grant of 1525. This unfortunately-named levy was designed to allow Henry VIII to take advantage of the defeat and capture of the King of France to prosecute his French claims. The title was not just a piece of newspeak: it expressed a crucial ambiguity in Late Medieval constitutional thinking. The King must not tax without ...”

“... by Wells the guise of a kind of literary frolic, is a would-be lethal attack upon an old friend, Henry James. The issues here are not altogether simple. It is certain that James had for long held Wells’s fiction in very high regard. He is on record as informing a group of Cambridge undergraduates in 1909 that Kipps was ‘the best novel of the last forty ...”

“... to ‘take Britain into Europe’ had a public relations problem. Is that still the case? Are Hugh Thomas and Michael Heseltine right in arguing that Britain’s leaders are now lagging behind public opinion in Europeanism or, at the very least, that they are failing in their duty to enthuse us? That two Conservative public figures should, within a space of ...”

“... to hear our island story. Children are given a mix of topics at primary, a cursory run through Henry VIII and Hitler at secondary and many give up the subject at 14, without knowing how the vivid episodes of our past become a connected narrative. Well, this trashing of our past has to stop. Simon Schama is the person entrusted with the job of putting ...”

“... been allowed at the abbey. Samuel Pepys went to see the corpse of Catherine of Valois – wife of Henry V, disinterred during Henry VII’s rebuilding of the Lady Chapel. ‘I did kiss her mouth,’ he wrote in 1669. In 1806, having failed to ‘get’ Nelson after his death (he was buried in St Paul’s), the vergers had a ...”

“... while less visible property could be discovered by asking ‘divers the neighbours of the said Thomas Grene what the said Thomas Grene is worth’. The system of circulating credit generated its own information about property. The witness who said John Tanner couldn’t ‘levye xx s’ claimed to know that because he ...”

“... splendid new book, entertaining and disturbing in equal measure, is an account of the career of Henry Aloysius Cotton, an ebullient, ambitious American psychiatrist who met this challenge. Scull, whose usual territory is British asylums of the 19th century, has turned his attention to the goings on at Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey, where Cotton held ...”

“... to persuade him to temper his unhealthy lifestyle, they used to point out how awful it would be if Henry Kissinger outlived him. Hitchens spent years pursuing Kissinger in print – and sometimes in person – for his assorted war crimes. He wanted to see him prosecuted at The Hague. Failing that, wouldn’t it be worth forgoing the odd drink or cigarette in ...”

“... have taken place almost uninterruptedly for a century and more. For the imperial Britain in which Henry Wood’s Proms began in the summer of 1895 was a very different place from the post-imperial Britain in which the BBC Proms have been performed in the summer of 2007, and this in turn helps explain why the Proms, like other regularly repeated rituals, have ...”