“... a hundred years earlier, so profound was the transformation between the reigns of Henry VIII and James I. Despite rampantly high mortality rates, the population quadrupled to around 200,000, blurring the boundary between the medieval cities of London and Westminster. By 1600, hideously overcrowded tenements, with dozens of families sharing the same ...”

“... James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work ...”

“... agreement, who acted uprightly and failed, seeps through, as does his dislike of De Valera and Sir James Craig. His good guys were duped and let down, while the last two died in their beds, full of Irish honours. Thus O’Connell and Parnell seem to react primarily to English stimuli, and the autonomous growth of Sinn Fein occurs in a chapter given over ...”

“... the border the old Roman road – now the A140 – which heads north from Ipswich towards Norwich. James Bettley, who has already revised Essex, is responsible for the expansion. The Buildings of England series has left Penguin for Yale University Press, who have both overseen the third edition of the series and continued with the new volumes of Buildings of ...”

“... the extent to which it combined reverent devotion to the law with hatred and contempt for lawyers. James Nayler, for example, claimed that ‘the law, as it is now used, is scarce serviceable for any other end but for the envious man who hath much money to revenge himself of his neighbour.’ This type of hostility to the legal profession is worth more ...”

“... and abroad. ‘Ah – I wish Providence had made me a publisher,’ he once remarked to one such, Edward Chapman. This is a prospect which his fellow authors would hardly have relished. Although in his letters he often reiterated his modest purpose in writing novels – to ‘improve’ the personal and social morality of his day – he had no time for any ...”

“... a political orator and thinker was yet to take off. Other heavyweights joined a few years later: Edward Gibbon was made a member in 1774 and Adam Smith in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself ...”

“... Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself suddenly as a copy of the blue room at the Amalienburg near ...”

“... The publication in Britain of Edward Dorn’s Collected Poems is a big moment, a bonfire of the verities, for the embattled tribe of local enthusiasts, veterans of old poetry wars who are still, more or less, standing. Dorn’s face is news again, live and loud, on a cover laid out like a wanted poster, or the freeze-frame of a sun-bounced downhill skier, against a backcloth of enlarged script (his own words, not the usual blizzard of corporate logos ...”

“... misfortune. To lose two, at different times, is surely remarkable. Such was the distinction of Sir Edward Grey, who served as foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916. A lion got his brother George, who was hunting in British East Africa in 1911: excited for the kill, he galloped too near his prey, missed and was mauled. Charles, having lost an arm and won an MC in ...”

“... Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind the iconic mask of royalty, she apologised for her appearance, ‘the face ... I might well blush to offer’, but not for her mind, of which she would never be ashamed. It was a mind which as yet ...”

“... abandon a crusade in which they have invested so much. After a lifetime’s campaigning to prove James Hanratty’s innocence, the incorruptible Paul Foot refused to accept the DNA evidence that after all Hanratty had raped Valerie Storie and therefore must have been guilty of the A6 murder. Ultimately, we are not dealing with rival scientific theories. We ...”

“... up to Charles III’s coronation, the Guardian flourished its discovery of a document recording Edward Colston’s grant to William III of shares in the Royal African Company, which shipped more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an embarrassing but hardly revelatory find: the king was the company’s titular governor ...”

“... and social interests, and becoming more complex still with the publication thirty years ago of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said doesn’t discuss The Arabian Nights itself, but he does scathe some of its scholars and translators, notably the English Arabist Edward Lane, whose three-volume edition, illustrated with ...”

“... found the core of his talent. It all started with a spirited exchange in print with Henry James. In September 1884, when Stevenson was new to that oasis of convalescents, he picked up a copy of Longman’s Magazine, which carried James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. He knew ...”