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“... Thomas Edison invented himself, and then he invented the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite ...”

“... poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he.’ This assertion by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe in November 1647 seems almost a cliché, as much part of the democratic history of England as the Magna Carta or the Tolpuddle Martyrs or Paine’s Rights of Man. Yet for two and a half centuries after Rainborowe said his piece, no one knew ...”

“... then, were well-launched on the road south. How much one sympathises with the subsequent effort of Thomas Chalmers and the Disruption to adhere to a concept of Scottishness that respected honest content, not bogus form. But events in Scotland could almost serve as a parable for what was to come elsewhere. As Eric Hobsbawm well appreciates, new nations and ...”

“... revealed that there were other ways of writing verse than those prescribed either by the Dylan Thomas school of apocalyptic word-chimers, or by the Movement, in whose manifestos he detected – rightly, I think – a fatal ‘whiff of little Englandism’. So, after beginning unsteadily, with early poems that had not quite assimilated the influences of ...”

“... alive. They are a comic duo called Lemon and Tangerine, played with great relish by Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Their stylistic home is more like Sesame Street than Monty Python. As you will gather, this film is not looking for tonal consistency. The two men are much given to violent, insulting argument – they can’t agree, for ...”

“... the tears of Desdemona, and the outrageousness and ingratitude of Prince George as Prince Hal. Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park remarks that ‘one gets acquainted with Shakespeare without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Shakespeare was certainly very much there in spirit, partly due to the acting of Kean and Mrs ...”

“... is Macaulay, whose brilliant narratives are freer than most of blindness to the Celts. But Henry Hallam, F.W. Maitland and, above all, William Stubbs are presented as the high priests of inveterate Englishism. ‘Despite their immense erudition and their enormous services to the subject, all these scholars positively crowed with nationalistic ...”

“... financial pressures and a hail of deadlines. The looming Frankfurt Book Fair caused such stress in Thomas Platter’s printing house in 1536 that Platter’s partner Balthasar Ruch attacked him with a ‘heavy pine board’ while Platter was correcting proofs. We sense this mix of industry and panic, of erudition and hard graft, in a Moses Thym engraving from ...”

“... 15 October. Shot in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire; became part of the collection of the Rev. Thomas Gisborne of Staffordshire, known for his 1797 book, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. Exhibited, along with a Baillon’s crake, at a meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastlein 1828; drawn by the engraver ...”

“... his impeccable ecological credentials, which anticipate those of another wilderness-loving loner, Henry David Thoreau, Natty is also, as the book’s final words put it, ‘the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent’. More than three thousand copies of The Pioneers were purchased within ...”

“... bones. The Dark Frontier started out as a parody of the stories Ambler had such scorn for. Henry Barstow is a mild-mannered, overworked physicist who lives in Wimbledon. While on holiday in the West Country, he has a car accident from which he emerges convinced he is Conway Carruthers, the lantern-jawed hero of a sixth-rate thriller he had glanced ...”

“... the House of Representatives, the precedent evoked is that of 1800, ‘when Colonel Burr and Thomas Jefferson each received the same number of votes’. The most interesting historical figure in 1876 is Tilden, whose principled refusal to cheat the process (or work it) is viewed by Schuyler with equal measures of respect and impatience. Tilden is one of ...”

“... and hear the early orchestral recordings, with their patchy intonation. Elgar, Adrian Boult, Henry Wood, Thomas Beecham: the gentleman-conductors held sway, stiff and upholstered on the podium, their white moustaches like frozen waterfalls, their batons cocked like riding crops. Elgar famously told the teenaged Yehudi ...”

“... it should have some ‘chastening influence … on the self-confidence of mankind’, and Henry Adams likened the news to the foundering of the Republican Party: ‘the sum and triumph of civilisation … our greatest achievement sinks at a touch … Nature jeers at us for our folly.’ The sinking of the Titanic very quickly seemed freighted with ...”

“... far from what would in Britain be called ‘Victorian’. Not surprising, perhaps, given how much Thomas Carlyle took from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and civic ...”