“... the 16th century The Age of Plunder (1976), declaring, on the first page, with the assistance of Thomas More in Utopia, that ‘the whole of English history, certainly since 1066, has been a history of plunder by the governing class and its officials and other hangers-on.’ (More had written, and Hoskins quoted the line three times: ‘So God help me, I can ...”

“... Italiano, latino e francese’ by Annibale Antonini (1770) The most important fixer was Thomas Jenkins, who began as a dealer, became a banker and ended up as de facto British consul in Rome. His name is everywhere in the exhibition, one of the largely forgotten figures whose importance it recovers. Elsewhere the story is in parts familiar. There ...”

“... the original?’ Even her most ambitious descriptions – those that bring her closest to, say, William Carlos Williams, or to Edward Thomas for that matter – remind us that we see only what we have learned to see, what our lives and our societies will let us see, that there is no unmediated nature: The cold rays of the ...”

“... Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit ...”

“... of the jury’s power to determine its own verdict, free from the threat of punishment. But if William Penn were to preach at Gracechurch Street today, Mr Bushel and his fellows would be unable to afford him the protection of their special verdict, since the case – as a public order offence – would not come before a jury at all. The ink of the Criminal ...”

“... academic blackballing of Isaac Deutscher, Schlesinger would later try to out the historian William Appleman Williams as a communist to the president of the American Historical Association.) The Life article cost Schlesinger many of his friends on the left, but it won him new admirers, including the actor Ronald Reagan, who later said Schlesinger’s ...”

“... doctors are increasingly prominent in creating ever more terrifying abysses of anxiety. Whether William Acton’s famous observation that women generally experience little sexual desire is typical remains much debated, but there is no question that he was in the forefront of making male desire, whose existence was not in question, a cause of morbid ...”

“... There have been multiplayer computer games for as long as there have been computer games. In 1958, William Higginbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island invented a game, played on an oscilloscope, called Tennis for Two. A variation of it was released by Atari as the arcade game Pong in 1972, which enjoyed a brief period of enormous ...”

“... to think tanks. Leading the rightist rising were the conservative intellectuals in the orbit of William F. Buckley’s National Review and the zealous campus activists of Young Americans for Freedom (a group ultimately larger and far more influential than the much celebrated leftist Students for a Democratic Society), as well as members of the staunchly ...”

“... on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who achieves a grisly sense of selfhood after killing two women: his black girlfriend and the daughter of his wealthy white employer. But even that novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James ...”

“... summarised Bible in verse; and The old, old, very old man, a verse biography of 152-year-old Thomas Parr. Taylor celebrated his paper boat trip in print, too, with a poem published in 1620 as The Praise of Hemp-Seed. As poetry it never rises above the laborious (‘Our rotten bottom all to tatters fell,/And left our boat as bottomless as hell’), its ...”

“... enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public interest ... should you not rather propose that all power and domination should be given to the Lord?’ Sedgwick, like many others, was frank about the ...”

“... coincidence of surname – the Dawkins in question was the geologist and palaeontologist Sir William Boyd Dawkins, not a direct ancestor, if ancestor at all, of the present carrier of the Darwin meme – before Johnson has recovered from his spiritual despond. In a twinkling he has reconciled God and Darwin. Thereafter his magnificent self-confidence ...”

“... slippage down the ranks. Muir has countless examples of young men watching their own stock fall. William Jones, curate of the parish of Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, got by on £60 a year and considered himself worse off than ‘a bricklayer’s labourer or the turner of a razor grinder’s wheel’; Basil Hall, the son of James Hall, a baronet and MP, wrote ...”

“... period pieces anyway, it might appear shockingly polemical for James Shapiro to locate everything William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in a topical context. Salzman’s aim was simply ‘to solve some of the problems raised by the theoretically informed return to history in Renaissance/early modern studies over the last fifteen years’. By contrast, Shapiro ...”