“... sunrise. Around midday, retirees emerge from their mansion flats to have amiable arguments about Henry VIII and the Battle of Britain. At night, music blares out of neon-fronted bars. Nobody makes much effort to understand or even acknowledge the changes that have occurred. ‘It had been a long time since anyone could make sense of anything.’Phillip ...”

“... it a strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but this was not to become the standard ...”

“... of the upper classes, with his good temper and considerateness, his easy good manners and what Thomas Mann called his ‘boyhaft’ good looks. This affection, rarely reciprocated by English authors, goes back at least to the time of Herder and Goethe. Here is the Göttingen physicist and aphorist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, writing in 1776, a quarter of ...”

“... by feeding the insatiable hunger of the US military. DuPont was founded in 1802 at the behest of Thomas Jefferson to manufacture ‘black powder’ (a mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal) for the army. Over the next hundred years it specialised in gunpowder and explosives, until diversifying in the early 20th century into the production of other ...”

“... decades of American Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 ...”

“... Holkham is the immutable fact and she understands it entirely as it relates to her family. Thomas Coke (1697-1759), who commissioned the house, is introduced as the first earl in the fifth creation, but neither William Kent, who was largely responsible for the design, nor Capability Brown, who also worked at Holkham, merits a mention. The Codex ...”

“... Great wits don’t always readily agree, and there was another on the scene in the person of Henry Cockburn, whose career and reputation show several points of similarity with Smith’s: the two did not quarrel, but he was to have more to do with Cockburn’s friend Jeffrey, editor of the Review. Jeffrey’s cockiness and scepticism were chided and ...”

“... presence in the world didn’t dim.Secularism, reason, scepticism don’t bring disenchantment, Thomas Laqueur argues in this monumental study, the harvest of more than ten years’ concentrated exploring of archives, tombstones, battlefields and furnace design. Laqueur principally scrutinises developments since around 1700, mostly in England, but he places ...”

“... epitome of the treasure of health’, which drew on the work of the 15th-century alchemists Thomas Norton and George Ripley, who in turn were indebted to the formulations of Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Majorcan polymath. The key to alchemy was deep reading, between texts and across the ages. Keynes’s scrabbling about for Newton’s papers was as ...”

“... shadow to the devil for magical gifts quickly squandered and so lost his ‘human belonging’, as Thomas Mann put it. Here the Latin adage nomen omen has an ironic twist, for Chamisso thought Schlemihl meant ‘beloved of God’. Variations on the theme abound – his shadow turns up in a Hawthorne story, and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s character Erasmus Spikher ...”

“... before proceeding to John Selden (1584-1654) and William Dugdale (1605-86), and on to Thomas Hearne (1678-1735). Hearne was a quarrelsome man, sacked from his job in the Bodleian Library for his Jacobite sympathies. Pope devoted five lethal lines to him in the third book of The Dunciad, adopting Chaucerian English for his purpose: ‘But who is ...”

“... of the truth.’ As one of Clough’s most sympathetic 19th-century readers, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, observed, he was a man who would neither ‘heartily accept mundane conditions and pursue the objects of ordinary mankind’ nor ‘reject them as a devotee of something definite’. The poems themselves are persistently drawn into this ...”

“... She was suspicious of ‘stress’ explanations of witchcraft cases, and rightly doubtful of the Thomas-Macfarlane thesis of the disappearance of a good-neighbourly ethic. This disappearance, like the rise of the middle classes, has been credited to so many periods that it cannot be right for them all. I read a piece, many years ago, which dated it to the ...”

“... militantly committed to publicising the emblems of primitive religion. The rich but unintellectual Henry Blundell of Ince Blundell in Lancashire had a statue which had attracted d’Hancarville’s admiring notice, of a reclining hermaphrodite with infants at the breasts. Blundell heretically declared it unnatural and took a short way to putting matters ...”

“... lack of corroboration from any European chronicle that eventually – and much to the annoyance of Henry VII – put an end to Arthur-based claims of ancient seniority for English kings.As for the many modern attempts to make sense likewise of Nennius’s list of battles, by identifying place-names and trying to construct a plausible campaign history, Higham ...”