“... William Lilly was the first to produce a major textbook of astrology in the English language, at a time when the truth of astrology was almost universally recognised. At their peak in the 1650s his almanacs sold up to 30,000 copies a year. From them he may only have netted a modest £70 a year (enough for a gentleman to live on), but they served to advertise his astrological practice, from which we have the surviving records of many thousands of consultations ...”

“... On 19 October 1844 the overweight William Makepeace Thackeray – if his travel diary tells the truth – laboriously climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops and pasted up banners advertising Punch, ‘thus introducing civilisation to Egypt’. The Egyptians put up with this sort of thing. Thomas Holloway, the great pill-maker, is supposed to have introduced eupepsia to Egypt by advertising his product from the same vantage-point ...”

“... referring to ‘pecuniary sacrifices from his fondness & his folly’, was prophetic: the boy, William, received financial support for years to come. Cockayne suggests that the philandering earl may not, in fact, have been William’s father: perhaps it was Frederick, a dashing naval officer and a favoured nephew of the ...”

“... William Empson maintained that there was a right and a wrong moment to bring theory into the business of intelligent reading, and that the professionals chose the wrong one, but he could not do without theory altogether. His book The Structure of Complex Words (1951) contains quite a lot of it; so it is not surprising that a generation of literary theorists, not wishing to remain totally out of touch with the best critic of his time, has decided to appropriate Complex Words, a work hitherto much less influential than the very early (and prodigious) Seven Types of Ambiguity ...”

“... of Beauties of Sterne, the Wit and Wisdom of Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot’s Sayings, or the Thomas Hardy Calendar, and the few who have actually looked inside such volumes will have done so only because the ‘real’ copy of the novel they were seeking had already been taken out of the library. Trained in a system which encourages the dutiful reading ...”

“... Temple of Apollo’ after Claude Lorrain by William Woollett (1760) Among various unforgettable moments in a life much of which has been spent thinking about landscape in literature and the visual arts was a remark made ten years ago by Kirsty Wark in the programme which follows Newsnight on Fridays, in which she was chairing a discussion of the Gainsborough exhibition then at Tate Britain ...”

“... glib, reliant on obvious visual tricks. (Walpole reported that Schalcken had once burned William III’s fingers with tallow during a portrait session.) Wright’s early candlelights, as if to scotch the lingering association, are dazzlingly sharp and bright, with none of Schalcken’s suggestive boudoir fuzziness. The illuminated boy’s face in Two ...”

“... about art, theatre and history; about Blake, Ruskin, Faraday, Milton, Constable and Purcell. William Empson, who studied English with him at Cambridge in the late 1920s, and with whom he started the magazine Experiment, thought of Jennings as ‘quite unaffectedly a leader’ who ‘was rather unconscious of other people, except as an ...”

“... a glamorous young aristocrat (he was 19 when Venus and Adonis appeared) who was also the ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This is the way ambitious Elizabethan poets got on in the world: they found a generous aristocratic patron, whose taste, praised in a lavish dedication, in turn constituted a marketable endorsement. That this worked for ...”

“... of the Slave Trade' by Isaac Cruikshank (1792) Cruikshank based his drawing on a story told by William Wilberforce in a speech delivered in the House of Commons a week earlier, in April 1792, at the apogee of the campaign to ban the British slave trade. But while many in the country had spoken in favour of abolition – the Commons had received 519 ...”

“... was responsible (both ‘Henry Frederic Howard Fitzwilliam of London’ and ‘Edmund Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool’ feature as husband to ‘Jane Austen of Steventon’).In January 1796, Austen wrote to Cassandra about Thomas Lefroy, the man it has been speculated she hoped to marry. She teases Cassandra with ...”

“... is arresting in the above scene is a New York detective, Rico Tubbs, played by Philip Michael Thomas, and about to become Crockett’s partner. He’s after the same drug lord as Crockett is, so that in the previous encounter to set up a supposed deal, three out of the four players were undercover agents. Generally in this series there are so many agents ...”

“... a load of nearly 800 lbs. In 1721, a judge at the Old Bailey sentenced two supposed highwaymen, Thomas Cross and William Spiggot, to be pressed for refusing to submit a plea. The prisoner, he instructed, ‘shall be laid upon the bare ground [and] upon his body shall be laid so much Iron and Stone as he can bear and more ...”

“... of the architecture. In the case of the Wellcome building a sculpture was commissioned from the Thomas Heatherwick Studio and it bears an analogously close relationship to the style of the building. Both building and sculpture are technically accomplished, coolly anonymous and assured. The sculpture consists of almost 27,000 fine, closely spaced wires ...”

“... Tate Britain until 21 August), there are many examples of that freshness: two of the most famous, Thomas Girtin’s The White House at Chelsea and Turner’s Blue Rigi, hang side by side. There is also Bonington’s view of the Piazza dell’Erbe in Verona, which gives a sense of moving crowds and shifting light that makes Canaletto’s Venetian crowds and ...”