“... Reading the English translations of the Psalms – reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal ...”

“... to celebrate the fact that he was the first English nobleman to tour the Far East. Paintings of Thomas Wentworth and Archbishop Laud, men who had risen to power, show expressions closer to those of Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII’s functionaries. Laud (the son of a Reading cloth merchant and, like the king, a short ...”

“... 1675. But when she bore him a daughter, the fact had to be reported to Rochester by his friend Henry Savile, who added: ‘I doubt she does not lie in in much state, for a friend and protectress of hers in the Mall was much lamenting her poverty very lately, not without some gentle reflexions on your lordship’s want either of generosity or of bowels ...”

“... to 1909, has not exactly been neglected, but Nathan Miller’s 1992 biography was the first since Henry Pringle’s in 1931. Edmund Morris won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, a bestseller despite its 863 pages, and now he gives us the Presidential years in a svelte, eminently readable 772 pages. Some critics (mostly ...”

“... careers. Though it presents itself as an American Civil War picaresque (the opening line is: ‘Thomas Jefferson Woodhull was 11 years old when he ran away from home to join the Union army’), it gradually turns into a sort of steampunk horror story, featuring the reanimation of corpses and characters with names like The Urfeist and Colonel Blood. Its ...”

“... who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ‘all this’ is still debated. The way in which the commotions began tends to support the view of, among others, Abraham Lincoln and Harold Macmillan that events are the motors of history, not policy ...”

“... Bay Company, established in 1670 to exploit the potential of the North American fur trade. Henry Hudson had discovered the vast body of water in Canada’s northeast that bears his name 60 years earlier, in the summer of 1610. (The previous year, exploring further south, he had sailed from New York Bay up what we now call the Hudson River to where ...”

“... speech, for example, were entrusted entirely to elected representatives of the popular will like Henry Hyde and Trent Lott. But that doesn’t prove they’re right. The question concerns the relation between theories of justice and conceptions of institutional design. Waldron faults John Rawls for treating the institutional question only for the case of a ...”

“... the poor, already far apart, diverged still further during the 16th century, and in 1597, the year Henry IV was written, thousands died of starvation or of diseases brought on by malnutrition. Appleby concludes that the important question of the relation between malnutrition and infectious disease is still open. The fourth paper indicative of the new approach ...”

“... like all other Americans, no consciousness at all, you would be happier.’ In London, he tells Henry, he would have to ‘fight very hard, in order to survive’, but that would surely be better than having friends notable only for their ‘immaturity of feeling’. Mrs Eliot rather wickedly prints a letter to the poet from a distinguished and aged kinsman ...”

“... Stevenson’s adolescent rebellion against his father. Unlike Pope-Hennessy, he does not highlight Thomas Stevenson’s agonised declaration on being told his son was an agnostic: ‘You have rendered my whole life a failure.’ When he discovered that his son was actually preaching atheism to other young men, Thomas went ...”

“... In​ 1841 Thomas Carlyle declared that ‘the History of the world is but the Biography of great men.’ Soon after, Thomas Babington Macaulay, a policymaker in British India as well as a historian, wrote that ‘a people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants ...”

“... series of articles published in the London Journal by the Whig writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and which first appeared as a collection in 1724, took a similar line.By the 1740s, neo-Roman arguments were being used to underpin Britain’s claims to be a free state. However, several major novelists – ...”

“... in childbirth; his handwriting was shaky and he blotted his signature. When in the 1590s the poet Henry Lok, anxiously seeking patronage, dedicated sonnets to the great men of the age, he wrote of Robert Cecil’s ‘painefull daies, your many watchfull nights’. He wasn’t exaggerating. Stephen Alford’s All His Spies is an account of a man at the heart ...”

“... said, ‘that when we had hardly been a year wearing broadcloth at court in mourning for King Henry II, silks had already sunk so low in everyone’s opinion that if you saw anyone dressed in them you immediately set them down as a bourgeois.’ Though the copywriters would like to have us believe that one instinctively knows when something is right, in ...”