“... became orthodoxy for men like Dod, Cleaver, Bradshaw. Hildersham, Baynes, Sibbes, Preston. Thomas Hooker and Ames. Dr Kendall sums up: ‘we are saved by grace, we are assured by works. Other writers above have implied this: Sibbes says it.’ Assurance is ‘a reward of exact walking’. Men should ‘labour to be such as God may love us’. This is ...”

“... 1805 to 1807, and sent home to her family. Parts of these journals have already been published, in Thomas Sadleir’s An Irish Peer on the Continent (1920) and in Lady Londonderry and H.M. Hyde’s The Russian Journals and Letters of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (1934). For the present selection, which covers both tours, Elizabeth Mavor has gone back to the ...”

“... of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind.’ Who said this? Jeremy Corbyn? Thomas Piketty? In fact it was Nick Hanauer, an American entrepreneur and multibillionaire, who in a TED talk in 2014 confessed to living a life that the rest of us ‘can’t even imagine’. Hanauer doesn’t believe he’s particularly talented or unusually ...”

“... Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the gas oven; Missolonghi, per Byron; Rome, to the Keats-Shelley House; Vienna, where Auden bore out his own prophecy: ‘I shall probably die ...”

“... of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, commissioned by Boydell from painters including Reynolds and Henry Fuseli. The gallery was an important force behind surging 18th-century bardolatry, and part of Boydell’s broader project to encourage British history painting. The paintings were not for sale but served to attract punters (or ‘patrons of native ...”

“... and Suffolk. They came through the disorder of the 15th century intact, swore allegiance to Henry Tudor, gained security of property and found knighthoods, seats in Parliament and minor positions at court. In the 16th century another Clement, a sea captain and courtier, built a great fortune from what was more or less piracy. The reckless strain in the ...”

“... indicate his lineage. This is the painting which has become known as the Sanders portrait, after Thomas Sanders, the man who in 1908 took it to Marion Henry Spielmann, author of the pioneering Portraits of Shakespeare (1907), claiming that a hitherto undocumented family tradition identified it as a likeness of William ...”

“... state. The State of Nature, meanwhile, was itself a site of conflict. The reductive party, with Thomas Hobbes at its head, saw human motivation as entirely egoistic at root (Hobbes’s problem was to explain how a mass of competing egos came up in the end with a system of law which protects the weak multitude). Locke’s State of Nature was much less ...”

“... In Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001), Clair Hughes gave us a beautifully judged view of James’s delicate way with garments. She showed that he was capable of conveying the effect of an entire ensemble in a few well-chosen words, and of accurately rendering the way dress affects feeling. James, we learn, is at his most quicksilvery when writing about clothes ...”

“... wonders what he would have made of Stone’s lectures, in which we were taken back to the reign of Henry VIII, and learned as much about population movements and the educational system as about religion and politics. It was the total history of the English old regime which was the true subject of these spell-binding lectures, delivered in the hall of Wadham ...”

“... intellectuals. The latter were perhaps the most pious exponents of the ‘one nation’ ideal. Thomas Davis lived the spirit of the United exhortation to think ‘little of our ancestors, much of our posterity’. The finest of their many fine phrases, it was, sadly, among the vainest. The past resisted all efforts to subjugate it to the future. Reality ...”

“... This is the first full-length study of James Thomson’s life and work since Henry Salt’s in 1889. Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ...”

“... ability to command a flattering reflection. If anyone thought that at 54 inches around the waist, Henry VIII was fat, they thought twice about saying so and in Holbein’s portraits of the king his bulk is translated into an image of monumentality and strength. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut was portrayed in sculpture as slender with delicate features. The ...”

“... comes to vivid life as a pasticheur. ‘The truest Plagiarism is the truest Poetry,’ claims Thomas Chatterton, warming to Ackroyd’s theme, and perhaps overdoing it, along with Ackroyd’s Wilde, who had been able to believe that ‘almost all the methods and conventions of art and life found their highest expression in parody.’ Still, such claims do ...”

“... and sent to the House of Correction in Brixton for fourteen days. Up for the second time, Thomas Cooper was alleged to have stolen a machine for sweeping chimneys which belonged to John Deaton, and was committed for trial. James Ryall, John Burridge, John White and Thomas Wall were re-examined for passing ...”