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“... sum. The contract for Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1667 paid him two instalments of £5 and may have got his widow a further £8. The average annual income for an agricultural labourer in 1710 was a little over £17, and a solicitor at that time might earn around £113 a year. Pope published his Works in 1717, something which no English poet under ...”

“... Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late films. In Two Rode Together, Stewart and his co-star, Richard Widmark, are lost to their better qualities, lazy, loud-voiced, working from an undernourished script, with the stupefied strut of the American male who has inherited the world in 1961. Soon after, to brilliant and opposite effect, in The Man Who Shot ...”

“... more to those discussed here – as are the movies and documentaries, with Albert Finney following Richard Burton and Robert Hardy as a screen Churchill. As for approval ratings, in an admittedly contrived phone-poll BBC2 viewers last November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at ...”

“... every Indian pollster forecast another BJP triumph before the election results were announced in May. Few believed that the Italian-born head of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty could lead the Congress-dominated alliance to victory. In the 1990s, threatened by a possible challenge from Mario Cuomo, the governor of New York, Bill Clinton declared that the American ...”

“... fall’, and she was not alone in finding in him an innocence of the world that lay about him.As Richard Holmes’s 1974 biography showed with such intelligence and affection, Shelley was fully aware of his reputation for being away with the fairies and became brilliantly adept at playing along with it, often to seductive effect; but it wasn’t just an ...”

“... three-million dollar extravaganza held at a five-star hotel in Sun City, South Africa, in May 2013. Two hundred guests arrived from New Delhi on a chartered Airbus that was allowed to land at a nearby military airbase. Vega’s uncle Atul Gupta met the guests, who were taken to the resort without any passport or visa checks. One hundred and thirty ...”

“... emperor had had enough. He offered the governance of Italy to Theodoric and his followers (whom we may for convenience call the Ostrogoths, though they were a pretty diverse lot), if they could take it from Odoacer. Theodoric duly defeated Odoacer at Verona in September 489 and accepted his field army’s surrender at Milan shortly afterwards. He then trapped ...”

“... the Irving house, to meet the remarkable talking animal. In 1936 he reached the High Court when Richard Lambert, the editor of the Listener, brought an action against Sir Cecil (Lord) Levita, who was reported to have said that Lambert was ‘cracked’ and ‘off his head’ for publicly stating a belief in a mongoose with powers of speech. Lambert was the ...”

“... speculation’. Its style and approach, it’s true, bring Kitty Kelley to mind more often than Richard Ellmann: it is aimed squarely at an audience conceived as wanting its close readings of ‘Pike’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’ leavened by details of Hughes’s ‘vigorous’ love-making, and likely to be impressed by pseudo-profound sentences such as ...”

“... defined by reference to the Earth’s dimensions. When Britain obstructed these strange notions, Richard Cobden lamented his countrymen’s ‘Chinese conservatism’. On the whole, however, co-operation outweighed controversy. The French dominated the natural sciences and mathematics, but admired the British steam engine and its manifold applications. At ...”

“... month I was granted British citizenship and I very much love this country. Possibly I may die, but I will die as a free person, and my son and wife are free people. And Britain is a great country.’ Litvinenko died four days later, on 23 November 2006. Six hours before it happened Scotland Yard got a phone call from the Atomic Weapons ...”

“... The British Army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ...”

“... misleading impression that it was easy to accuse someone of witchcraft on flimsy pretexts, which may have been true during severe panics but usually was not. Persistent doubt throughout the early modern period explains both the relative rarity of prosecutions – around 100,000 across an entire continent and three centuries is not that many – and the high ...”

“... over Maastricht without ever recovering politically, Major finally got ratification through in May 1993, a couple of days after the Danes were forced into holding a second referendum. At the Treasury, Kenneth Clarke presided over a return to growth, but it was of no electoral avail. The Conservatives were comprehensively thrashed in the elections of ...”

“... was giving an award to Republican Senator Amo Houghton for being a good egg. I spoke to Richard Kind, who plays the press secretary in the sitcom Spin City, and his chum Tim Blake Nelson, who was very funny in O Brother, where art thou? ‘It’s a fair trade issue,’ said Richard Kind. ‘Canada is constantly ...”