“... shades vigilantly or solicitously hovering over their shoulders as they write. The biographer of Thomas Carlyle is supervised more severely than most: the irritable, brooding Scotsman, the would-be redeemer, and, failing that, the scourge of Victorian England, seems to breathe flame down his neck. To write about Carlyle with both authority and imagination is ...”

“... but ashes and clay – to be radically permeable. Pilgrims to Canterbury drank holy water from St Thomas Becket’s shrine because it was thought to be mixed with his blood; they chewed the melted wax or burnt wicks of the candles that lay before the altar. St Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, was so holy that he took a bite out of a relic: the arm bone of Mary ...”

“... family betrayal: at first of the inheritance of the broad-church Anglicanism of his famous father, Thomas Arnold; and then – not once, but twice – in the danger to his marriage to Julia, the anti-Catholic he had married in New Zealand. Bernard Bergonzi’s description of Thomas Arnold the Younger as a ‘Victorian ...”

“... 1946, well before McCarthyism, he published a detailed exposé of the American Communist Party in Henry Luce’s Life magazine. In Schlesinger’s telling, the minuscule communist presence in the country had ballooned into a vast left-wing conspiracy. ‘Communists are working overtime to expand party influence, open and covert, in the labour movement, among ...”

“... if to make them extinct all over again. The very first notable attempt to depict prehistoric life, Henry Thomas De la Beche’s Duria Antiquior (c.1830), prominently features the ichthyosaur v. plesiosaur tableau that would become so common. In De la Beche’s watercolour, the dolphin-like former crushes the snake-like neck of the latter between vicious ...”

“... who was a queen herself for a spell: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother. In an age when Thomas More showed his radical mettle by according his daughters the same education as his sons, Anne had been allowed to cultivate her mind to an unusual degree; she had also corresponded with Marguerite, with whom she shared an interest in Reform theology and ...”

“... A Grand Old Junky. An aroma of Establishment dignity now attaches to him. In the early Sixties, Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary, saw fit to deny him a visa to stay in Britain. He was undesirable. The TLS did all in its power to keep Naked Lunch from publication, proscribing it as ‘vomit’. Nevertheless, helped by a determined defence from its British ...”

“... of Christ’s blood, a gift from the patriarch of Jerusalem. Retracing his coronation route, Henry III processed on foot from St Paul’s to a Westminster Abbey undergoing reconstruction, where he was greeted by more than a hundred monks ‘tearfully singing and exulting’. In an echo of the hippos’ swamp, the Strand was so deep in mud in 1315 that ...”

“... and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the barrenness of American culture. Many of the angelheaded hipsters whom I met busied themselves in learning Old Church Slavonic or translating ...”

“... cited Algarotti in a note: Pushkin’s various notes are not fully reproduced in D.M. Thomas’s new translation, nor in Sir Charles Johnston’s of 1981). But ambiguity has always surrounded the statue, along with its imperial subject. The city which stood for a modernised and liberalised Russia was said to have cost a hundred thousand lives in ...”

“... It was clear that Henry Ford’s audacious attempt to establish a vast rubber plantation in Amazonia had failed long before the first shipment of latex from Singapore arrived in Brazil in 1951. When the plantation, which was larger than the state of New Jersey, was set up in 1928, the Washington Post’s headline had boasted that it was expected to provide the latex for two million cars a year streaming off the assembly line in Dearborn, Michigan ...”

“... of succeeding her father had increased following the unexpected death of her elder brother, Henry, in autumn 1612. Her younger brother, Charles, was sickly and frail. Much of the militant Protestant fervour that Henry had attracted was transferred to Elizabeth and her family, whose fortunes became, to many English ...”

“... side of human nature. And it certainly doesn’t help that his principal modern apologist is Henry Kissinger, another supposed friend of tyrants, who built his later career as an exponent of realpolitik on the intellectual foundations of his Harvard doctorate, published as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace ...”

“... Prince d’Amour’ for Christmas 1597). This is the set of ‘Cabalistical Verses’ prefaced to Thomas Coryate’s eccentric account of a European tour, Coryats Crudities Hastily gobled up in five Moneths of travell (1611), a book which, mock-patronised by Prince Henry, is introduced by laboriously facetious ...”

“... biography of Gore Vidal. Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than Carlyle), understands that it’s much easier to get the paperwork done if you don’t have the living-breathing item second-guessing you at every turn or trying to use you as a ventriloquist’s ...”