“... the Utilitarians, when we think of the period as an era of freedom. There is the great anarchist William Godwin, whose treasured insight it was that our impulses are the artefacts of society and who didn’t hesitate to carry that insight into the sexual domain. His feminist partner Mary Wollstonecraft applied the same thought to women’s sexual ...”

“... the girl to the absorbing society of transplanted Anglo-America. Taken to the hospitable home of William Wetmore Story in Rome, a handsome apartment in the Palazzo Barberini, she met people who had known George Eliot, Thackeray, the Brownings. This, even at the age of 12, was a world where she felt instantly at home. Among the many details uncovered by ...”

“... old king’s restoration. Then in 1338 the records of the king’s wardrobe show that a man called William le Galeys ‘who asserts that he is the father of the lord king’ was taken to Koblenz, where he may have met Edward III. Around the same time a papal notary, Manuel Fieschi, wrote to Edward about encountering a man who claimed to be Edward II and was ...”

“... On​ 10 January 1616, Sir Thomas Roe was received by Emperor Jahangir at his court in Ajmer in Northern India. Jahangir sat in an overhead gallery, with guests standing in hierarchically ranked tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on ...”

“... to detail. How much could a person expect to be paid for the upkeep of a marsupial in 1611? William Walker, keeper of fowl at the menagerie in St James’s Park, was paid five shillings a month to care for England’s first recorded opossum. What was the customs duty on an emu in 1801? Joseph Banks narrowly avoided customs duty ad valorem – duty based ...”

“... inhabitants. In a sentence that defined the problem legitimate commerce sought to address, Thomas Malthus went further: ‘The state of Africa, as I have described it, is exactly such as we should expect in a country where the capture of men was considered as a more advantageous employment than agriculture or manufactures.’But what if abolitionists ...”

“... shades vigilantly or solicitously hovering over their shoulders as they write. The biographer of Thomas Carlyle is supervised more severely than most: the irritable, brooding Scotsman, the would-be redeemer, and, failing that, the scourge of Victorian England, seems to breathe flame down his neck. To write about Carlyle with both authority and imagination is ...”

“... which favoured Jewish readmission. MPs are unlikely to have been reassured by the activities of Thomas Tany, ‘Theaureau John’. Informed by nocturnal revelations that God had commissioned him to gather the dispersed Jews and lead them to the Holy Land, Tany proceeded to establish assembly camps at Greenwich and Lambeth, ‘tents for every tribe, and the ...”

“... is part of the Christian tradition of seeing the Jew as inherently, biologically different. Thomas de Cantimpré, the 13th-century anatomist, calling on St Augustine as his authority, presented the first ‘scientific’ statement of this phenomenon. Male Jews, he said, menstruated as a mark of pathological difference. The image of the Jewish male as ...”

“... which is notable for its lavish attention to the social and cultural life of objects. In novels by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Kathleen Thompson, Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, the encounter with technology is a small step taken, often regardless, on a journey defined by an ever-shifting horizon of expectations and ...”

“... his drinking bouts. Under the prosecutor’s eye he can be made to look like a less amiable Dylan Thomas. The merit of the stories and poems called in to excuse or justify such a life has also been questioned. D.H. Lawrence called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both ...”

“... of Dilettanti and Wood’s essay on the original genius of Homer. During the Seventies, Sir William Hamilton, who had personally taken part in the excavations, did much to make the new discoveries known. After England’s isolation from the Continent was ended by Napoleon’s defeat, interest in the buried cities heightened. Two very different ...”

“... on committees; it could hardly be mistaken for a creature of the same name defended long ago by William Blake. Dame Helen herself seems often to speak on behalf of some public body. And sure enough she speaks up for Lord Robbins and her other colleagues, for the most part robustly impenitent though prepared to concede ‘a disturbing development, which we ...”

“... into a fire burning in a hole in the ground (a method recommended by the sorely-tried slaver, Thomas Phelps, on the Barbary coast). The affected part could be scourged with a whip of nettles or painted with caustic; or tiny bonfires of moss could be started in strategic parts to drive the pain elsewhere. As an alleviating drug, colchicum enjoyed a long ...”

“... marches, music and a roll-call of the various craftsmen involved, written in bad verse by the poet Thomas Middleton. The reservoir was soon enlarged, and others built nearby. These served three purposes: by providing a large area of still water they allowed many impurities to settle to the bottom; they helped smooth out fluctuation in supply and demand; and ...”