“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... system that had once been popular with students and sermon note-takers, and was later used by Thomas Jefferson. Pepys had included a tachygraphy manual in the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, and Tomalin concludes that poor Smith ‘carried out the entire task without knowing that the key to the shorthand was in the library’. Loveman’s careful analysis of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by the resurgent Marxism and feminism of the 1960s, engaged scholars including T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock asked difficult questions about class, audience, gender and sexuality, questions that were soon rumbling through other fields as well. Yet disruptive though these inquiries were, they mostly continued to insist on ...”

“... the mid-1730s lobbied theatre managements to stage more Shakespeare; she had also encouraged Sir Thomas Hanmer, a former Speaker of the House of Commons, to prepare the Oxford edition of Shakespeare published in 1744, with a picture of the Westminster Abbey statue as a frontispiece. Nor were her artistic interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the ...”

“... alive. A lot of rather condescending nonsense used to be written about ‘the good little Thomas Hardy’ (James’s phrase, alas) and his modest social origins, those origins somehow explaining both the qualities and the lapses of his writing. Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that some of the power of his writing flows from his rural ...”

“... dated to the Grand Siècle, the time of the voyages to Mughal India of François Bernier or Thomas Coryate. Distinctions between the more advanced European cultures in the volume or quality of travellers’ tales would be difficult to make for most of the modern period. In the Enlightenment, for every Cook there was a Bougainville or Georg ...”

“... leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil ...”