“... John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and fifty years, but in the early 20th century druids appeared at Stonehenge and they have been there ever since. It is often pointed ...”

“... The Foundling Hospital​ was established in Bloomsbury in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram, ‘for the education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children’. Strictly speaking, they weren’t foundlings: the parents, or more usually the mother, had to hand over their offspring and were instructed to ‘affix on each child some particular writing, or other distinguishing mark or token, so that the child may be known thereafter if necessary ...”

“... Thomas​ Hobbes used to tell people that the Spanish Armada was the reason he had been born prematurely. ‘My mother gave birth to twins,’ he said, ‘myself and fear.’ He never shook off the sense of dread. More than half a century later, having fled England for France, he wrote Leviathan, predicated on the view that fear is the chief driver of man ...”

“... the search for Franklin began, and 1859, when M’Clintock discovered some grisly remains on King William Island, almost thirty naval and overland expeditions joined the search. A writer has to juggle the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark ...”

“... in style was striking. Set beside the early work of Pound and Eliot (or of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, for that matter), Frost’s ‘simple’ lyrics might have seemed to be some sort of throwback – as if they belonged far down the back slope of the great Modernist watershed. But those same unassuming poems earned Pound’s immediate ...”

“... When the Scottish radical lawyer, Thomas Muir, was tried before the infamous Lord Braxfield in 1793, he declared that if what he had advocated was treasonable, then Plato, Harrington and David Hume were equally guilty. To the present-day student of Hume, Muir’s inclusion of him in his catalogue of reformers must appear even odder than his appeal to Plato: for Hume is usually and rightly portrayed as a consistent defender of the 18th-century Hanoverian status quo ...”

“... manuscript’, was discovered in the archives of Hereford Cathedral in 1907. The next year Arthur Thomas Bannister became a canon there. His appointment had been somewhat controversial: a man ‘of singular simplicity and directness’, he was known for his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly rose ...”

“... Essex, a funeral brass shows an infant in swaddling clothes. It was made to preserve the memory of Thomas Greville, who ‘died in his tender age’ in 1492.Nicholas Orme is perhaps best known for Medieval Children, a lavishly illustrated survey published in 2001, which helped to popularise medievalists’ critique of Ariès. Tudor Children reuses some of the ...”

“... sporadic treatments of his short life as the cautionary tale of a blasphemer justly punished. Thomas Dabbs made a good start in Reforming Marlowe (1991) by looking at the way the Victorians and the Decadents rediscovered Marlowe as an aesthete and a deviant (Havelock Ellis, for instance, identified Marlowe as a ‘psychosexual hermaphrodite’ in Sexual ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... travelled to Taipei and helped draft the league’s agenda; at the league’s 1974 conference William F. Buckley gave the keynote address. And then there was John Singlaub, a retired general and another of the league’s main organisers, who thought the US government had fumbled the urban counter-insurgency against the Black Panthers and other radical ...”

“... Its predecessor, Wolf Hall, the first part of what will be a trilogy of novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell, carried the burden of beginning and perhaps also of containing too much history.* In it Thomas Cromwell frees Henry VIII from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, engineers his union with Anne Boleyn by ...”

“... A vivid reminder of the cost of that whole struggle to the Anglican Church is contained in Dr William Oddie’s unhelpfully-timed evocation of the Crockford’s Preface affair of two years ago. It is a curious work, in which the first half appears to have no other objective but the placing of Canon Gareth Bennett – the anonymous author of the 1987 ...”

“... he only needed control of the Channel for six hours to effect an invasion of England. After all, William of Orange had managed it in the autumn of 1688; and Bonnie Prince Charlie had got as far south as Derby with his ragamuffin army in December 1745. The notion of an impregnable island fortress was less convincing when 1688 and 1745 remained fresh in the ...”

“... of Shadows is an intricate interweaving of biographical portraits and individual stories: of William Moorcroft, the horse doctor with a mission to find new stock for the cavalry in British India; Charles Metcalfe, the advocate of a forward policy on the frontier in the early 19th century; Alexander ‘Bokhara’ Burnes, the foolhardy political ...”