“... land in 1583, or the 43 pipes of wine that John Poulson fished out of the Erme estuary in 1630. Canny landowners could do good business out of dangerous stretches of coast. Sir Nicholas Lestrange kept a list of ‘Wreck goods bought’ and ‘Wreck goods delivered’ at his manor in Hunstanton. In 1695 he paid out £56 ...”

“... freely embroidered, possessing a factual basis. The first, Diderot’s recent interviewee, is a canny, pleasure-loving provincial bourgeois renowned for the liqueurs he concocts. The other, ten years deceased, is Nicholas Saunderson, the calculator’s inventor, a successor to Newton as professor of mathematics at ...”

“... Twentieth-century Huxleys have received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws ...”

“... by the prime minister. Our fearless leader is a democrat only as and when it suits him. 20 March. Nicholas Hytner has shown the script of The History Boys to one of his former teachers at Manchester Grammar School, who says that teaching these days is so circumscribed that many traditional tools of the trade are now impermissible. Sarcasm, for instance, is ...”

“... which is currently showcasing the Stockists and their polemic exhibition, The Resignation of Sir Nicholas Serota. There are no other browsers when I visit the place, but the custodian is babbling on the phone: ‘It was a very cheap way to do up this building which was redundant.’ Drummond, responding to the requirement to ...”

“... cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment of the City. A benevolent and paternalistic employer was lost, along with the heady drench of hops from the brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the ...”