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“... the elite for works of this kind. They were consumed not only by dilettantes or libertines, like Horace Walpole, John Wilkes and James Boswell, but also by landowners, clerics and society hostesses – Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s confidante, owned several jestbooks and comic miscellanies. In this context it becomes easier – though still not ...”

“... to the walls of Victorian England.’ Nineteenth-century taste did, indeed, often favour what Horace Walpole a century before had called ‘gloomth’, and a later age may find lugubrious. Pre-Raphaelite weather, even when it is sunny, has a menacing immanence about it, and of course there is Dickens’s fog, which Harris discusses at length, along ...”

“... rights’; Wollstonecraft and her Revolution-loving ilk were ‘philosophising serpents’, hissed Horace Walpole; ‘virago’ and ‘harridan’ appear to have been reliable terms of abuse. Taylor herself gets into the swing of things, at one point referring to the early Wollstonecraft as a ‘prissy moralist’, and describing some of her rejoinders to ...”

“... serve,/And for my Bed the Grave.’ Morbid imaginings gave rise to material fears: before visiting Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, one guest asked not to be put up in ‘your best chintz bed, as I am in the secret, and know Sir Robert died in it.’ Good sleep was the key to good health. Following Aristotelian medical theory, it was believed in the ...”

“... it was made by Anne Seymour Damer (1748-1828), an aristocratic Englishwoman who was encouraged by Horace Walpole to take up sculpture for therapeutic purposes after the suicide of her dissolute husband, Lord Milton. Her special forte (apart from cross-dressing) was dog sculpture, and Walpole regarded her work as equal ...”

“... Whitehall and the crown jewels in the Tower. And there were many others. ‘Butcher’ Cumberland, Horace Walpole, Lord North, Charles Fox, the Younger Pitt and Edmund Burke were among those who were robbed or shot at. Yet the victims of crime were rarely prominent people: small shopkeepers and the middling sort were the principal sufferers. The law was ...”

“... with other influential enthusiasts for the antique – notably, Richard Hurd, Thomas Percy and Horace Walpole, who hoped he would visit Strawberry Hill, where he would find ‘some miniatures of scenes which I am pleased to find you love ... You might play at fancying yourself in a Castle described by Spenser.’ Thomas Percy, working away on his own ...”

“... lord in North’s ministry. It went to his head. ‘In an excess of vanity and presumption,’ Horace Walpole remarked, he acted as the leader of a party, ‘his arrogance, loquacity and intempernace raising him the enemies of a minister before he had acquired the power of one’. After only a year he resigned, having angered the King and embarrassed ...”

“... of great diarists and letter-writers, many of whom she knew, remarkably little was said about her. Horace Walpole and Fanny Burney are among those who are disappointingly laconic. Even people who knew her well and admired her did so for qualities that did not lend themselves to anecdote. Johann Fiorillo wrote of her ‘exceptional ...”

“... More sold out within three weeks; a second and third followed rapidly. ‘Holy Hannah’, as Horace Walpole called her (William Cobbett called her ‘the Old Bishop in petticoats’), was already a celebrity. William Roberts, the family friend entrusted with the task of producing the book, made her into a saint. He presented her as a vessel chosen ...”

“... to perpetuate the ethos of virtù and vandalism on home ground. ‘The nominal qualification,’ Horace Walpole, who was not a member, observed, ‘is having been in Italy, and the real one being drunk.’ The heyday of the society began with the riot at the Golden Eagle and ended, in Kelly’s account, on the eve of the French Revolution with the ...”

“... But friends who knew his passion for collecting art and antiquities suspected other motives. As Horace Walpole put it, ‘he is picture mad and will ruin himself in virtu land.’The posting, which lasted until 1800, has been described as a 35-year grand tour. Hamilton spent beyond his means on Roman vases, as well as paintings by Titian, Holbein and ...”

“... in ancient history’ as the Greeks or Romans, and the Persian Hafiz as great a poet as Horace. It was only unfamiliarity which made ignorant Europeans, who knew no language other than their own, praise one and ridicule the other. The same applied to Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal from 1773 until 1785, best remembered today as the ...”

“... woman he had once just as extravagantly flattered remains as elusive as ever. Stories abound, from Horace Walpole’s claim that she returned unlaundered some sheets she had borrowed from the poet, to her family’s belief that Pope had ventured a declaration of love and been met with a fit of laughter, but most of them are no more reliable than Woolf’s ...”

“... enough to license her tale of a dark quest for enlightenment (‘The Scotch nightman’, Horace Walpole called him.) For the surgeon, as for the doomed Giant, she invents a strange and suitable prose, self-tormenting and tireless, restive with theories and suppositions that cry out to be tested. It is no surprise that one of many legends about ...”