“... It was a curious set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing. Almost nothing in Cooper’s life up until that year, in which he turned 31, indicates an interest in fiction, or in the arts ...”

“... history’ involves the same sort of hyperbole as the Earl of Northampton’s claim, in 1610, that James I was ‘free from banqueting and surfeiting’. This sort of language gives hostages to fortune, and Sharpe’s claim has already been refuted in Dr Alison Gill’s thesis on the collection of Ship Money, which supersedes the collection figures on which ...”

“... what was to be done if, for example, a feudal tenant ‘happen to fail of his wit’. (Answer: the King had not only to protect the inheritance, but also to ensure that the profits were used to support both the lunatic and his family ‘competently’. Any surplus profits were retained for the tenant’s use, should he recover.) Historical myths are there to ...”

“... pocket-slim volumes of the Buildings of England, take years to complete each hefty replacement. James Bettley, responsible for the new Essex volume, did not even have to bother with Ilford, Romford, Leyton and Walthamstow. With the setting up of the GLC and the new administrative boundaries of 1965, Essex, as the blurb to the Shell Guide quaintly puts ...”

“... as an unusually bold writer in the Nation pointed out, ‘one more courtier straining to get the king’s ear’. But the Bush administration didn’t need eggheads to euphemise pre-emptive war, torture, rendition and indefinite offshore detention. Bush’s own demotic – ‘We’ll smoke them out,’ ‘wanted dead or alive’, ‘Pretty soon, we’ll have ...”

“... historians had swallowed the eloquent oppositional literature of Burke and others whole; that the King, far from wishing to revert to Stuart despotism, was an over-conscientious constitutional monarch; that those monolithic parties which the King was presumed to have subdued simply did not exist. Instead, transient ...”

“... of the Revolution is held to lie in its bloodless nature (except for the massive nose bleed of James II), and ‘bloodless’ is not quite the adjective attached to the event by either the Scots or the Irish. The Anglocentric interpretation of British history is long established, and has resulted in a most admirable, detailed and sophisticated ...”

“... Yet all the time he knows she is ‘hurrying to join him’. Creating an imaginary fresco of King Candaules awaiting his wife on the nuptial couch, Anthony Powell observes that the expectant monarch has in him ‘something of all men’, his spouse absorbed in her own rituals ‘something of all women’. In the legend, Candaules dies for thinking his ...”

“... documenting events, even precipitating events in order to document them and monetise them. Pat King, the most outspoken of the organisers, livestreamed his own arrest. James Bauder, the Prairie born-again Christian who started the convoy, believes God told him to do it in a prayer. Confronted by a journalist about the ...”

“... in public. ‘Blood has been moved between two dogs for the first time. Before the Society, Mr King and Mr Thomas Coxe successfully performed the experiment on a small bulldog and a spaniel.’ He fled debtors; was bankrupt from 1671; had to shift households and sell many of his books. He travelled to Paris with his friend George Ent, where he suffered ...”

“... on television, often in competing time spots, and that professional sycophants such as Larry King and Oprah Winfrey featured Schwarzenegger on their chat shows, which, being ‘non-political’, were exempt from equal-time strictures. Leaving aside the rather puerile ‘debates’ staged among the leading contenders (Schwarzenegger skipped the first ...”

“... such career opportunity. It was decided that she would be safer if she pretended to be married to James Crisp, the leader of the Ann party, a merchant who had, before her officer fiancé came along, taken an interest in her in Minorca. Colley gives an incisive portrait of the acting sultan of Morocco, the young Sidi Muhammad, who was the next in the long line ...”

“... for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk’. Anglophone readers who can locate ‘that’ part of Siberia without a good atlas deserve spot prizes. The historical date and exotic location gave Meek a fictional and cultural space in which extraordinary events and people could seem believable, when placed inside a landscape rendered in exact and first-hand detail ...”