“... on top of the daughter he had fathered before he married, he had himself had two children by Lady Elizabeth Foster (Bess); according to the double standards of the day that, however, was fully acceptable, and the Duke’s bastards by Bess were brought up alongside his legitimate children. Rather more unusually, Bess, too, lived in Devonshire House with the ...”

“... on their 1773 tour of the Hebrides, or Pablo Fanque (a.k.a. William Darby), the acrobat and North of England circus proprietor. We still don’t know how successfully black people integrated with their local communities in towns like Leicester, Greenock and Newcastle. Gerzina writes attractively and avoids the kind of jargon that mars much literary and ...”

“... He is provoked by the only thorough survey of the impact of printing to have been written, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (published in 1979 and abridged as The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe in 1983). Eisenstein argued – though less insistently than Johns’s criticisms might suggest – that one ...”

“... moment in Bleak House is not the trial’s conclusion, but trooper George Rouncewell’s journey north to Sheffield, in Chapter 63, to seek out his brother, a self-made man and owner of a vast iron foundry. George’s first look at the foundry is a look straight through the solid ontology of what exists to the possibilities of economic and social ...”

“... West, rather as paper-making spread from Asia through the Arab world from the eighth century, to North Africa and eventually to Spain. Gutenberg doesn’t seem to have travelled much, however, and even if a Korean text printed in movable type appeared in Mainz, White is probably right to doubt that Gutenberg could have guessed the method behind it. But even ...”

“... man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s world the dingy agents of the KGB and MI6 are interchangeable. Who can forget A.J.P. Taylor’s jibe that no spy ever told his masters anything of value they could not have gleaned from the press? Or Malcolm Muggeridge’s chronicles ...”

“... novel, and then his second novel. Eventually they did print his short stories. He was living in North London. He was married, probably being kept by his wife, who was a teacher. I edited his books and we became great friends. The other thing that bore fruit during my time at Deutsch was the Jean Rhys saga. I’d always thought her books were wonderful. I ...”

“... followed, his was still the third most cited name in the American press, behind Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor. He went on to advise presidents of all stripes, commanded huge fees on Wall Street, was lionised in China and feted by publishers. This has continued into his late nineties. Kissinger has always liked to draw a historical parallel from the first ...”

“... hardly at all. In his youth he had the courage of his unconcern: Nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west died away; Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; Bluish mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; In the dimmest north-east distance, dawned Gibraltar grand and gray; ‘Here and here ...”

“... mortality pattern of the period appears to lie within the systems covered by the Princeton North tables. Another problem patch is the 17th-century Interregnum, for replacement of ecclesiastical by secular registration created its own problems of under-recording. Some of the adjustments made are fairly arbitrary: in 17th-century London, plague ...”

“... chamberlain and his marshal’, had just been killed in the Süntel hills some sixty kilometres north-east of the source of the River Lippe. Latin’s lack of definite and indefinite articles leaves ambiguities in the annals that modern writers in German or English tend to iron out by inserting ‘the’ whenever Saxons appear. This can mislead. Becher ...”

“... In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the ...”

“... however, it was Benjamin Jesty who deserves priority as the first known vaccinator. Benjamin and Elizabeth Jesty lived with their three children in Yetminster, North Dorset. In 1774, it was commonly believed that milkmaids were protected from smallpox because of previous exposure to the cowpox ...”

“... the Calvinist international was often a matter of words or gestures, which cost rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists ...”

“... growing more African. He told stories of his ancestors – who came back to the Gold Coast from North America – freed slaves – including his grandfather, a prosperous trader, called Buck Savage . . . They were very English indeed these immigrant Creoles . . . went on the grand tour – bought Victorian plush furniture and so forth. In Cameroun he ...”