“... presents for the would-be popular biographer is evident in his entry in the Concise DNB: Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-1895), man of science; studied at Charing Cross Hospital; announced, 1845, discovery of the layer of cells in root sheath of hair which now bears his name; MB London, 1845; made assistant surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake 1846-50, investigations ...”

“... in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a radically new approach to the history of medicine. Now there are bodily histories of the emotions, of sexuality and gender, of political philosophy (‘the body ...”

“... a need for hope in Americans and in others, and much of that hope died with him. There is, as D.M. Thomas’s novel suggests, continuing disbelief – it can’t have happened, it is a bad dream or a mere movie, reality will pick up and go on again. There is the mythological investment in the Kennedys as a doomed dynasty, a notion which also appears in ...”

“... thorough account than Fried does of his stupendously meticulous reportage. The Coronation of King William I at Königsberg (1861-65), for example, essentially a history painting of painstakingly accurate scholarship, though set in the painter’s present, includes more than a hundred detailed portraits worked into the crowd of dignitaries. Fried does not ...”

“... they look like? Like a brown and purple cloud-shadow spread out across the uplands, described by William Atkins in characteristically fine focus when he says of the North Yorkshire moors that ‘the new blooms were silverish specks; they were pale grey, beige and mint green. I picked a sprig, but the moor-purple visible from a distance was not a colour you ...”

“... Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the Spanish ...”

“... summer of 1743, the English engraver George Vertue paid tribute to his friend the ‘ingenious’ William Taverner, who ‘besides his practice of the Law ... has an extraordinary Genius in drawing and painting Landskips, equal if not superior in some degree to any painter in England’. Like other contemporary amateur producers of landscape ...”

“... Bellow replied that his study had been English literature. He was asked to give his opinion of William Wordsworth as a poet. He responded that he had always thought of William Wordsworth as one of the Romantics. ‘There is no place for you,’ said Chambers on hearing this, ‘in this organisation.’ The future Nobel ...”

“... set in among the Royalists on the opposite hill. Standing next to Baxter was the godly Major Thomas Harrison. As the Cavaliers broke and fled, Baxter heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture’. Exultant vengefulness was common in the Civil Wars of the 17th century, which ...”

“... episode made me turn later to Buchan’s Life of Cromwell to refresh my memory of the character of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, who, like Greene, had friends in both political camps. Turning idly to the seemingly unpromising character of Cromwell himself, I could not help being struck by the aptness to Greene of phrase after phrase in Buchan’s final appraisal of ...”

“... in past times belong to what Peter Laslett calls, hauntingly, the world we have lost. The Diary of Thomas Turner claims notice as a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s neighbours, Thomas Fuller and ...”

“... John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the ...”

“... one of the Reich’s lattermost days, we find Goebbels again settling down at bedtime with ‘Thomas Carlyle’s book’ drowning out the rumble of Soviet artillery and the RAF’s Mosquito raids. This is not an endorsement which brings a prophet honour in his own country. But Carlyle’s reputation was sunk long before the Nazis took him along to their ...”

“... By​ 1875 the eighty-year-old Thomas Carlyle was ready to die. In fact, he was rather looking forward to death, at least officially, more than once referring to it as ‘release’. To judge by the sixty letters to his brother that Carlyle wrote (or, rather, dictated, his own hand having become too unsteady) between December 1875 and March 1879, there was much to be released from ...”

“... reductionism which popular works on the historiography of science have done little to discourage. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions envisaged competition between two rival and incommensurable ‘paradigms’ as the hallmark of a revolutionary period. A greater theoretical diversity and the science had to be regarded as immature and ...”