“... the poet and waterman John Taylor wrote, ‘as good for nothing but stoppe mustard pots.’ Sir William Cornwallis kept ‘pamphlets and lying-stories and two-penny poets’ in his privy, and many texts were ‘pressed into general service’, as Margaret Spufford put it in Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), as toilet paper. Books were pulled apart ...”

“... proved even more difficult. That show, which she called Black Eyes and Lemonade, a quotation from Thomas Moore, is now back in a different form at the Whitechapel, as the subject of its own exhibition (until 1 September). The problem was one of definition. The organisation of Black Eyes and Lemonade was shared with the Society for Education in the Arts ...”

“... The gradings, for instance, are not always consistent: the first of three articles on the trial of William Hone is graded A but the third gets a C, and we aren’t given a reason for the difference. On another occasion Wu feels that an article is ‘beyond doubt’ written by Hazlitt, yet awards it a B. Sometimes the arguments for attribution involve a special ...”

“... at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,’ Admiral William Leahy, wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir. ‘The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.’ Eisenhower later said it had been his belief at the time ‘that Japan was already defeated and that dropping ...”

“... Fruman in condemning Coleridge as an impotent fraud and plagiarist, many reluctantly agreed with Thomas McFarland when he declared: ‘Coleridge’s ruin, in both life and work, is ... the true human fact; the academic classic and the conventional achievement the illusion.’ It may be that in the protracted aftermath to the much insisted on death of the ...”

“... Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en passant, the Princeton University Press as a place where inventive, wordy studies in Romantic ideas receive elegant ...”

“... between the places where the earliest ‘Robinhood’ surnames are found, is the huge honour of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (1298-1322), stretching right across Northern England, and down through the Midlands to Sussex. Building on this vital clue, Holt goes on to resolve the peasant-gentleman debate by dissolving it. The word ‘yeoman’ in the later Middle ...”

“... friend who extracted exorbitant amounts of interest on his loans, and the unsavoury duo of Thomas Bridgen and William Holt Averell, who ended up acquiring, by various devious stratagems, much of the land and property that had made up his father’s estate. Cooper was no naif in such matters, but his situation was ...”

“... When he first heard of William Morris’s death, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary, ‘He is the most wonderful man I have known,’ then added more equivocally: ‘unique in this, that he had no thought for anything or person, including himself, but only for the work he had in hand.’ This handsome new edition of Morris’s letters does not entirely answer our natural question of how a man so often apparently unmoved by other persons should have had the explosive creative energy to become famous as poet, artist, decorator, printer, manufacturer and socialist ...”

“... declined to comment. After all, the PM is apparently also related to Moses, Catherine the Great, William IV and Boris Johnson, and in 2013 was outed as the first cousin six times removed of a West Indian slave-owner. But one of Low’s other descendants – and another of Cameron’s relatives – was ready to respond. Ferdinand Mount is the ...”

“... and Fire, but that was bagged a couple of years ago by Roy Hattersley for his massive biography of William and Catherine Booth, the Army’s founders. William, the ‘Fool of God’ who made such diverse sinners as Cecil Rhodes and Margot Asquith kneel and pray with him in railway carriages, remains something of a background ...”

“... judge robbed by the brothers was said to have ‘sold the laws as if they were oxen or cows’. In William Langland’s Piers Plowman is a reference to ‘Folvilles’ laws’, under which men were entitled to ‘ride and recover’ by force from wicked men what had been unlawfully acquired. Piers Plowman also contains references to that ‘deeply obscure ...”

“... The bicentennial of 2019 celebrated the arrival of the city-state’s ‘founding father’, Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, whose name graces countless schools and institutions, the famous hotel, and the world’s largest flower. ‘Without 1819, we may never have been launched on the path to nationhood as we know it today,’ the prime minister, Lee ...”

“... of a text by Porson; and the knowledge that Exeter College, Oxford has a dining-hall, in which William Sewell once publicly burned a copy of Froude’s Nemesis of Faith, has led him to refer to it by the name of Exeter Hall, a building in London where Elderess Polly, Elderess Antoinette and other Nonconformist orators dear to Matthew Arnold used to edify ...”

“... my father.This passage is very close indeed to the translation in the Matthew Bible of 1537 (by William Tyndale) and there are just two differences from the King James Bible of 1611 (‘evil occurrent’ in place of ‘any evil plague’; ‘purpose’ for ‘am determined’). But this version is from the Great Bible of 1539-40, ‘the Bible appointed to ...”