“... The last time a ‘gentleman of the road’ cried ‘Stand and deliver!’ on an English highway is thought to have been in 1831. High tobymen, or horsed robbers, had yielded the field to low tobymen, or footpads, and roadside thieving had lost its traditional panache. By coincidence 1831 was the year the robber fraternity that had given the word ‘thug’ to the language came under terminal assault: the British in India, showing a zeal never displayed against England’s home-bred highwaymen, rounded up in six years 3266 devotees of thuggee, hanged 412 and imprisoned or transported hundreds more, extinguishing a centuries-old cult ...”

“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”

“... is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used again in the portrait of Richard Arkwright. Miss Cracroft from the same year is a tumble of satin and lace; a veil blows from her shoulder and flowers garland her bosom, but despite the mobile stuffs her face is as still, her back as rigid, as Anne Bateman’s. The catalogue suggests ...”

“... the favourites: Even more than the better-known The Forest Lovers I loved The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, about King Richard the Lion-Hearted, published in 1900 ... the medieval romances I was writing at top speed on an empty stomach were meant to be in his manner. I cannot remember whether I showed any of them ...”

“... Hampton, Windsor) and charging them with nostalgia. It is, I think, the only piece of English verse to give place names something of the power they have in Dante’s momentary biography of La Pia (‘Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma’ – ‘Siena made me, Maremma unmade me’). It also gives away just enough biographical detail to have been blown ...”

“... Trippie and Jacobus Depre. (The two Jacobi would, of course, be Jacques in French and James in English. Mullett is elsewhere written as Millett, and Trippie as Tippey.) Mountjoy puts up £20 – half of the required bail – to guarantee their appearance at the forthcoming Sessions of the Peace, where they are ‘bound to answere their incontinencye wth ...”

“... church towers and at Oxford and Cambridge colleges the latest architectural ideas were emerging as English Perpendicular, the fine-boned local expression of Gothic. Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like ...”

“... by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered ...”

“... of William Grant Stairs and memoirs of Alice Pike Barney’; he also pays generous tribute to Richard Hall’s earlier biography, ‘a model of hard-nosed and painstaking investigation’. Hall was the first to reveal Stanley’s secret engagement to Alice Pike. Unfortunately, his excitement over this discovery led him to make the tactical error of ...”

“... for a split at 1815 and an end in the 1880s. So in choosing to conclude his new survey at 1880, Richard Price joins a long tradition of irreverent timekeeping. Except that, according to Price, it is not the 19th century that ends in the 1880s, but the ‘long’ 18th century. In recent years the lifetime of the distinctive political regime and social ...”

“... in 1740, a date at which many educated persons and even second-rate playwrights could write lively English. Cibber became Poet Laureate and is now best known as the victim of Pope’s ridicule, but his book gives one a lively idea not only of the theatre of his day and its antecedents but of the political world in which it had to exist. His perceptive sketches ...”

“... time to notice the high-spiritedness of his friends, happy to be in the company of the head of the English Catholics, a man not given to any obvious show of relaxation but, rather, seeming constantly anxious about being behind with business. Nearby is the English College, or the Venerable ...”

“... emperor to receive a conventional education, at Gakushuin, Japan’s grandest school; among his English tutors was Elizabeth Vining, an American Quaker, who nicknamed him ‘Jimmy’. ‘His interests in those days were almost entirely confined to fish,’ she wrote later, ‘and I felt they needed broadening.’ The influence of this American pacifist on ...”

“... colour pictures for the coronation sitting that really transport Elizabeth back into the prewar English almost avant-garde. With her gold and ermine and intense red mouth, she might have been captured by the semi-surrealist pioneer of colour Madame Yevonde. The brilliance of Beaton’s early royal photographs, especially the coronation pictures, consists in ...”

“... Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures on Elocution was once a great hit in Edinburgh. The other Thomas Sheridan, known as Tommy to the tabloids and to friends and enemies alike, is the former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, and his efforts to represent himself in a defamation case against the News of the World has been providing the city with a theatrical spectacle the Edinburgh Festival will struggle to equal ...”