“... Haven because, as the earliest local histories record, two Boston-based Royalists – a merchant, Thomas Kellond, and a mariner, Thomas Kirk – were granted search warrants in May 1661 and came within two miles of their camp. In Harris’s version, a disorientated and panicking Nayler enters the actual rock formation but ...”

“... which favoured Jewish readmission. MPs are unlikely to have been reassured by the activities of Thomas Tany, ‘Theaureau John’. Informed by nocturnal revelations that God had commissioned him to gather the dispersed Jews and lead them to the Holy Land, Tany proceeded to establish assembly camps at Greenwich and Lambeth, ‘tents for every tribe, and the ...”

“... may have been implicated (with other members of his family) in support for Lady Jane Grey and in Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary of 1553-54: perhaps this was one of the reasons he fled England shortly afterwards. No less formative was the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, when thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by their Catholic ...”

“... producing literary texts cunningly modelled on the work of some well-known author like Tennyson or Thomas Moore, which they then coolly claimed to be the lost original that the author had plagiarised. Maginn, who founded Fraser’s Magazine and died an alcoholic pauper, is said to have been familiar with Hebrew, Syriac, Sanskrit, Basque, Turkish, Assyrian and ...”

“... to the Swedish state, to be ‘administered by the Swedish Institute in Rome’. The house, which Henry James described as ‘a creation of the most fantastic beauty, poetry and inutility I have ever seen clustered together’, is now a museum, nature reserve and writers’ retreat. The book it lends its name to is harder to categorise. As a young man, Munthe ...”

“... ends if and only if we consecrate our lives to God. Then you will believe that, in the words of Thomas Cranmer, the service of God ‘is perfect freedom’. Or suppose you accept the Aristotelian argument that man is a political animal, the argument restated as a theory of freedom by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (1961). Then you will believe ...”

“... at some time during this period; and so did men of the calibre of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy to have been born an Englishman, in the 18th century,’ mused the latter, and if one had the right class and gender and a taste for rhetoric, flair and ...”

“... out of their possessions. ‘You do wisely … when in a Crowd, to amuse the Mob by Quarrels,’ Henry Fielding’s master-criminal Jonathan Wild advises his gang, ‘that while they are listening to your Jargon, you may with the greater Ease and Safety, pick their Pockets.’ In The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Peachum, a thief-catcher, surveys with Lockit the ...”

“... as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of bones, a hollow-eyed, coughing wretch. ...”

“... by the editions of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747) – and each had been able to offer what a modern commissioning editor would call a Unique Selling Point. The First Folio had supplied 18 plays which had never been printed before, quite apart from an authorised ...”

“... of one of the most elaborately layered examples of dramatic irony in the Elizabethan canon, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which not only contains two inset theatrical performances, but whose whole action is framed by the presence of an onstage audience. Mullaney is, I think, the first to remark on the seeming wastefulness of this metadramatic ...”

“... The 13th-century jurist Henri de Bracton, who formalised the growing body of case law under Henry III, had stressed that ‘in misdeeds we look to the will and not the outcome,’ and consequently ‘a madman is not liable.’ From this point on, madness was defined by legal concepts such as mens rea (guilty intention) and non compos mentis (unsound ...”

“... and last dying speeches of executed criminals for the street trade described in the pages of Henry Mayhew. Between these occupants of the darkest literary limbo and the comparatively prosperous and established writers of serial fiction and ‘think pieces’ for middle-class magazines and reviews lay the large underclass of book-writers who are the ...”

“... Margaret Walker of Coggeshall in Essex lost her husband at Sherborne; he was in the revolutionary Thomas Rainborough’s regiment, and left her ‘a poor distressed widow’. There were hundreds of similar stories. Strangways was himself a victim. The man who proclaimed the king’s return to the town had been captured at the castle in 1645, imprisoned in ...”

“... Jay Winter’s introduction to the work in honour of Henry Pelling points to a shift that has been taking place in the writing of labour history – from concentration on militant strivings towards interest in the ordinary existence of working men and women. The first approach was pioneered by a number of Marxist scholars ...”