“... with long chapters about the two grandfathers. Bertie (pronounced ‘Bartie’) Mitford and Thomas ‘Tap’ Bowles were both tremendous swells. They looked rather similar, something like Edward Elgar, and when they were in the House of Commons they worked together in a spirited, efficient and defiantly independent ...”

“... appendicitis on which depended the life of the man who was about to become King of England, but Edward and Alexandra had long been patrons of the London Hospital and this up-and-coming doctor would have come to their notice without the Elephant Man. If he continued to build up a lucrative Wimpole Street practice, it was because he was a notably skilled ...”

“... some engaging pictures of potentates, not all trustworthy-looking. But do we need a portrait of Edward VII just because he sat on the platform at a Curzon lecture? The Ladies of Castlebrae is a saga of learned frumps triumphant. It describes how wealthy twin sisters from Ayrshire, blue-stockings who in fact wore white stockings, travelled to St ...”

“... across the UK were predominantly a result of rural-urban divides.Townshend refers to the work of Thomas Macknight, a journalist often credited with pioneering the ‘two nations theory’ – in which Ulster Protestants form their own distinct nation on the island of Ireland. He doesn’t mention W.F. Moneypenny’s The Two Irish Nations: An Essay on Home ...”

“... and inflammation of the infected arm. But they didn’t contract smallpox.Two decades later, Edward Jenner, a doctor and fellow of the Royal Society, went a step further. He infected a young boy with cowpox and then, two months later, with smallpox (a questionable approach, but Jenner had himself been inoculated as a child). The boy had a fever from the ...”

“... Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style ...”

“... in its everyday susceptibility to invasion by outside forces. Cowper, like Mansfield Park after Edward Said’s reading and Patricia Rozema’s movie, will never be the same again, and we will wonder why we never saw him this way before. Some of the best parts of Favret’s book are about the pervasive metaphorisation of military violence in the vocabulary ...”

“... of the earliest literature in French was written in England, including some of the most famous: Thomas of Britain’s Tristan, and, very possibly, the lais of Marie de France. More was written under the broad aegis of the Angevin courts, of Henry II and the various powerful women connected with him (his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, her daughter Marie de ...”

“... anything to the exalting or setting forth . . . of images, or any such superstition,’ Thomas Cromwell’s Injunctions of that year insisted, ‘ye shall now openly afore the same recant and reprove the same.’ From mid-September 1538 Morebath obediently and completely abandoned the active promotion of the cult of the saints which had until then ...”

“... to change all that. It follows the career of a character closely modelled on the oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, as seen from the perspective of his son. Doheny did more than anyone to usher in global petroleum dependency. In 1892 he drilled the first oil well in Los Angeles. The crude oil he found there was too viscous to be turned into kerosene ...”

“... religion was an instrument of political domination – could serve the English state overseas. Thomas Harriot, a dangerous atheist at home, could use his ‘Machiavellian’ insights to show the Virginian settlers that the Indians could be cowed not only by direct force but by the power of their own imaginations, by myths such as the nightmarish notion ...”

“... reductionism which popular works on the historiography of science have done little to discourage. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions envisaged competition between two rival and incommensurable ‘paradigms’ as the hallmark of a revolutionary period. A greater theoretical diversity and the science had to be regarded as immature and ...”

“... Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the ...”

“... 1794 the runners were working for the Home Office, employed in the surveillance of radicals. When Thomas Hardy, secretary of the London Corresponding Society, was arrested prior to his trial (and eventual acquittal) for high treason, among those who came for him, at six in the morning when he and his wife were asleep, were the two most high-profile runners in ...”

“... Wooster, audibly something of a waster, has a first name which associates him with the womanising Edward VII, but with that surname, a cockerel with a weak r, a Wooster trying to be a Rooster, he could never hope to be a hit with the ladies. As for his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle (whose name suggests Wodehouse learned a trick or two from Evelyn Waugh, for whom ...”