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“... his preferred Neo-Romantic illustrators, Keith Vaughan and John Minton excelled. Minton decorated Elizabeth David’s first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food with tipsy Breton sailors, market girls, lobster pots, fruits de mer, as a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the dedicated text. As Wright says, when you take up a book published by Lehmann you get ...”

“... before he had acquired the power of one’. After only a year he resigned, having angered the King and embarrassed his seniors, and spent the next eight years in opposition, denouncing North over the war with America and throwing in his lot with the Whig oligarchy he had formerly decried. Yet he still kept his options open. In 1782 he returned to office ...”

“... in public. ‘Blood has been moved between two dogs for the first time. Before the Society, Mr King and Mr Thomas Coxe successfully performed the experiment on a small bulldog and a spaniel.’ He fled debtors; was bankrupt from 1671; had to shift households and sell many of his books. He travelled to Paris with his friend George Ent, where he suffered ...”

“... the bewildered hunter, for the very day Natty killed the buck he also saved the judge’s daughter Elizabeth from an attack by an enraged cougar, and the grateful father is inclined to be lenient – but the law comes first. At this stage Cooper clearly did not foresee Natty developing into the hero of a string of books, much less emerging as the mythic ...”

“... texts written by men who lived in the time of Alexander or knew someone who had. Soon after the King’s death, little tracts appeared. In ‘The Last Days of Alexander and Hephaestion’, Ephippus described the drunken excesses of Alexander and his ‘best friend’ on their return from India, how Alexander liked to dress up as a god, wearing the ram’s ...”

“... to an heiress for four years in order to travel the world, which he could not ask a wife to do. Elizabeth Longford, in her introduction, describes this as a characteristic blend of ‘cold calculation and sensitive consideration’. The book consists of extracts from Curzon’s Tales of Travel, Russia in Central Asia and Leaves from a Viceroy’s Notebook ...”

“... to fire up a dinner party. I don’t fully understand the sources of Mencken’s anger, and Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, though she has written a balanced and formidably well-informed biography, does little to elucidate them. ‘Infancy, that nonage Mencken defined as the larval stage of his life, began for him on 12 September 1880,’ she tells us. ‘Of his ...”

“... us, however, that elite women were sometimes tutored in the same way at home. Some of them, like Elizabeth Cary and Mary Sidney, wrote closet dramas that allowed women themselves to perform women’s passions.Noble women like Sidney, Cary and indeed Elizabeth I were tutored in modern languages as well as ancient ones. This ...”

“... It has long been accepted that neither the Union of Crowns of 1603, which saw the Scottish King James VI move south to London, nor the Treaty of Union of 1707 served to cancel out Scottish distinctiveness. In educational, ecclesiastical, intellectual and legal terms, and not only those, Scotland has always retained significant ...”

“... by precedent and by the constant repression of excess, partisanship and enthusiasm. Ever since Elizabeth I sacrificed her love life for the stability of the realm (deliberately casting shade on her lusty father’s reputation in the process), success as a monarch has been defined in popular culture largely as the uncomplaining suppression of private ...”

“... In​ 1660, a Commonwealth warship called HMS Naseby sailed to the Dutch Republic to bring the new king-in-waiting home to England. During its journey the ship was renamed the Royal Charles in honour of the Restoration, but her figurehead – a vast carving of Cromwell on horseback, wearing laurels and ‘trampling six nations under foot’, as John Evelyn put it – remained in place ...”

“... beside her on the bed. Esther before Ahasuerus (c.1628-30) is pure theatre, depicting the Persian king anachronistically decked out in full commedia dell’arte costume and framed by a red stage curtain; the fainting Esther is washed out not only by her days of fasting but also by the riot of colour that surrounds her. A similar stage curtain appears in ...”

“... spirit of the selection of Rochester’s works for 1691) strenuously elided the scene in which the King makes love to his catamite. The Rochester of 1691 may not have been the whole poet, but then neither was the Rochester of 1680. The compiler of Poems 1691 restored to the poet his emotional intelligence, his sensitivity and his seriousness. The new poems ...”

“... of one who finds life difficult. The heartbreak he suffered over the death of his wife Tetty (Elizabeth Porter) can be caught even though it is expressed only indirectly. There are no letters directly describing her death, and the letters do not reflect the agony of the private prayers (which we also have), but any of Johnson’s references to his loss ...”

“... he smashed up a priceless sundial in the Whitehall Privy Gardens bearing glass portraits of the king and the royal family.) Aggravated disturbances, big and small, give his poetry its character. The opening lines of ‘Tunbridge Wells’, a satire on the ‘fooles’ who flock to the spa town, are casually respectable but unmistakably dirty: ‘Att five ...”