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“... before proceeding to John Selden (1584-1654) and William Dugdale (1605-86), and on to Thomas Hearne (1678-1735). Hearne was a quarrelsome man, sacked from his job in the Bodleian Library for his Jacobite sympathies. Pope devoted five lethal lines to him in the third book of The Dunciad, adopting Chaucerian English for his purpose: ‘But who is ...”

“... in this country, though an unfamiliar name to most readers of verse in America. The other, Nicholas Christopher, is one of the most celebrated of America’s younger poets but – I suspect – an unknown figure in England, at least as a poet (his novel, The Soloist, was published by Pan last year). In each case, this disparity in reputation – this ...”

“... of names and places are buzzing around: the 17th-century antiquarian was William Dugdale, not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was ...”

“... Seduction: Being, An Account of the Late Proceedings . . . against the Reverend Abbée, Claudius Nicholas des Rues, for Committing Rapes upon 133 Virgins (1725), he voices anxiety ‘lest this Factum for Abbée des Rues, and the Revival of Marvell’s Works, should heap more Coals of Fire upon my Head’, and then adds defiantly that ‘as to the Principles ...”

“... As a biology teacher at a large comprehensive school, my sister was given the job of taking the second-formers for sex education. To unblock inhibitions in the first lesson, she decided on a mild form of aversion therapy: covering the blackboard with taboo words, words normally out of bounds in the discourse between a teacher and her twelve-year-old pupils ...”

“... On​ 13 May 1397, the visitors came to Ruardean in Gloucestershire. They learned that Nicholas Cuthler was causing a scandal among his neighbours. He had not come to terms with his father’s death and was making strange claims: he went about in public saying that his father’s spirit still walked the village at night ...”

“... who was not a doctor, had nothing to do with founding it. Giordano Bruno was not born at Nova. Thomas Norton was not assistant torturer to Richard Topcliffe, but the other way round. There was no British army in 1586. Not all of this is nit-picking. Unlike Riggs, who has interesting things to say about Marlowe’s prosody, Honan is deeper into his life ...”

“... his wife in a sand-dune. It is an excellent, profound and very odd second novel. The Frights is Nicholas Salaman’s first novel, and its material crosses at several points with Swift’s, though its treatment is quite different. Salaman’s prose is as rich as the celebrated fare of Cutcombe, the Somerset village where the action is set, and it has at ...”

“... country house, Downton Castle in Herefordshire, which is Classical within and castellated without. Nicholas Penny suggests that Downton is not so much Gothic as Romano-British, and certainly the quest for the truly primitive was to be a driving force behind Knight’s forays into other artistic fields. About the same time, the mid-l780s, he began to collect ...”

“... has suffered repeated jolts to its 16th and 17th-century foundations. In The Political World of Thomas Wentworth – a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and ...”

“... countryside, the English sense of humour, the English love of fair play.’ William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and Edward Elgar were brought forth to prove that the roots of British character lay deep in the countryside, and were still healthy despite the enervating effects of urban life. Yet to anyone who took the trouble to look dispassionately it was clear ...”

“... of the literature of contemporary social analysis ranging from that composed by Fynes Moryson and Thomas Dineley in the 17th century through that written by Charles O’Conor and Sir Jonah Barrington in the 18th, and forward to that executed by Conrad Arensberg and Rosemary Harris in the present century. Due acknowledgement is made by Dr Foster whenever he ...”

“... from Europe in 1948. White – the only antipodean to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on Bail’s shelf of severe masters – is the big daddy rabbit-killer; Bail and his minimalist contemporaries are something of a mopping-up operation. The anxiety here is that of being the last guest at the wake of Modernism, and so Bail is ...”

“... wine trade at the British Library later that day. That older trade tends to be skated over. Nicholas Faith’s The Winemasters of Bordeaux (1978) begins, more or less, with Pepys’s visit to the Royal Oak Tavern on Lombard Street in 1663, where he encountered ‘a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I ...”

“... and a leading member of the Clapham Sect (other members included William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, who orchestrated the British campaign against the slave trade). Sharp was a bundle of energy and full of contradictions. He pestered the powerful to address the difficulties facing London’s black population, but also entertained London society ...”