“... is a slippery enterprise. At the end of his immensely readable and often puckish exploration, Thomas Dixon sighs, with reason, that ‘it is impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon directs the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Keats might have thought this rather like a Department for Unweaving the Rainbow. Dixon is ...”

“... marches, music and a roll-call of the various craftsmen involved, written in bad verse by the poet Thomas Middleton. The reservoir was soon enlarged, and others built nearby. These served three purposes: by providing a large area of still water they allowed many impurities to settle to the bottom; they helped smooth out fluctuation in supply and demand; and ...”

“... to bear. ‘Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them,’ Henry James wrote in his preface to the New York Edition of What Maisie Knew. ‘Their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.’ This is also true of not so small ...”

“... rallied around it, but at the turn of the 20th century, the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry McNeal Turner declared that ‘to the Negro the American flag is a dirty and contemptible rag.’ In the 1960s, Civil Rights demonstrators carried it again, as a reminder that they too had the right to be full American citizens. On 4 November more than ...”

“... in particular make it possible to identify Burton’s circle of scholarly friends, among whom Thomas Hobbes was the most famous. Many others were famous in the history of early Oxford science: Henry Briggs, Thomas Lydyat, John Napier, Edmund Gunter. Almost three quarters of his ...”

“... but were divided over which English one to choose. We sight-read a massive six-voice piece by Thomas Weelkes, ‘Thule, the Period of Cosmographie’, with its second part, ‘The Andalusian Merchant’. But it was too difficult; we rehearsed another by Weelkes instead. I wondered why ‘Thule’ was so hard. I sang it with the piano. I bought a CD. Most ...”

“... Blood) or refused to make room for her as a Platonic third within a passionate marriage (Henry Fuseli) or abandoned her with an out-of-wedlock child (Gilbert Imlay) or otherwise failed to value her with the intensity, constancy and perseverance she required. These disappointments made her bitterly unhappy. They did not stop her from carrying on with ...”

“... with equal ruthlessness but more subtlety. One of the Pastons’ less attractive acquaintances, Thomas Daniel, got his foothold in Norfolk by promising his sister in marriage to the head of a local family and persuading him to sign over his land in trust in preparation for the marriage settlement, only to reveal that the girl was already married. Daniel ...”

“... of us, he insists, is a ‘messy business’. Contrary to what Sir William Osler or Dr Lewis Thomas might lead us to believe, death is ‘glutted with mental suffering and physical distress’. There was, he claims, ‘a nice Victorian reticence in denying the probability of a miserable prelude to mortality’ and he will disabuse us of our ...”

“... his translations smuggled into England. He had an in-and-out relationship with the government of Henry VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by ...”

“... of the late Regency and early Victorian London that Scharf knew were left by artists, notably Thomas Hosmer Shepherd and Thomas Shotter Boys, whose eyes were fixed on the city’s architectural splendours, old and new. As with Canaletto’s paintings, one has the feeling that Shepherd and Boys ignored the people ...”

“... of London. Dance gave Soane a place in his household. After three or four years he left Dance for Henry Holland, from whom he learned more of the business side of building and on whose book-keeping methods he probably modelled his own. He was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools at 18 and du Prey gives a lively picture of the Academy at this time, when ...”

“... The fourth volume of the Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy opens with a recommendation for Mr Harry Pouncy, ‘Lecturer and Entertainer’, of Dorchester, apparently with a view to his extending his fascinations to a wider public. There follows a note to Desmond MacCarthy suggesting – surely with the firm touch of a provincial or a Victorian survivor – that it would be better if the New Quarterly were called instead the Quarterly Herald or Quarterly Clarion, ‘or some such ...”

“... common people going about their daily business. There’s the snatch of conversation in Henry IV, Part I when a couple of carriers grumble about the inn at Rochester, the worst on the road for fleas: ‘Why, they will allow us ne’er a jorden, and then we leak in your chimney; and your chamber-lie breeds fleas like a loach.’ While this is a touch ...”

“... of his biographer. The broad conceptual sweeps that went into writing ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’ are also ones in which Maitland did not much indulge. Where the two historians are closest is in their picture of Parliaments, what they were, and what they were for, and Maitland’s famous essay on ‘Memoranda de Parliamento 1305’ calls ...”