“... enough to license her tale of a dark quest for enlightenment (‘The Scotch nightman’, Horace Walpole called him.) For the surgeon, as for the doomed Giant, she invents a strange and suitable prose, self-tormenting and tireless, restive with theories and suppositions that cry out to be tested. It is no surprise that one of many legends about ...”

“... No less serious were worries about upsetting the social hierarchy. ‘During her canvas,’ Horace Walpole recorded, ‘the Duchess made no scruple of visiting some of the humblest of electors, dazzling and enchanting them by the fascination of her manner, the power of her beauty and the influence of her high rank.’ That sort of thing would not ...”

“... in response to Burke’s attack on the French Revolution. Critics, predictably, were outraged (Horace Walpole called her a ‘hyena in petticoats’). She responded with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). ‘Both jeremiad and prophecy,’ according to Gordon, ‘Rights of Woman reveals her as a teacher, a hellfire preacher, a satirist and a ...”

“... sweet wine and would bleat like a calf when it saw anyone carrying its favourite food. In 1758, Horace Walpole described a camel (two humps) and a dromedary (one hump) that were on display in London. They were advertised as ‘a wonderful camel and a surprising camel’. ‘One wonders which was which,’ Grigson writes. An orangutan was called a ...”

“... whole plot of The Daughter of Time. Richard III has attracted passionate defenders ever since Horace Walpole took up the cause in the 18th century. It appealed to the stubborn contrarian in Tey, and to her scepticism of experts. ‘A man who is interested in what makes people tick doesn’t write history,’ Grant and his researcher agree in The ...”

“... for debt also produced his consistent anti-imperialism. Unlike Boswell, but like Swift and Horace Walpole, Johnson cried out against the bestiality of the Europeans in the New World. ‘The Europeans have scarcely visited any coast, but to gratify corruption; to arrogate dominion without right, and practise cruelty without incentive.’ In a ...”

“... as it does to Boswell’s hagiographic one in the Life. Nevertheless, both contemporaries such as Horace Walpole and modern Johnsonians such as Ralph Rader (who saw everything that was wrong with Hester’s view of Johnson in the contrast between her terse observation that he was a ‘gross feeder’ and Boswell’s ability to render even vein-bulging ...”

“... and Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis was buying up the letters and ephemera of the then neglected figure, Horace Walpole, a Yale historian whose very name trumpeted Anglophilic Waspdom, Chauncey B. Tinker, tracked down Boswell’s papers to Malahide Castle in Ireland. Initially, his pleas to be allowed access to them were turned down. But other, equally ...”

“... unique. In merely saying he had no instinctive preference for either Charles I or Oliver Cromwell, Horace Walpole was in advance of his time. Even when radicalism revived in the last decades of the 18th century, Cromwell’s rehabilitation was slow. Though his achievements were sometimes admired, his character was not. The radical William Godwin thought ...”

“... were so strenuous that within ten days Madame Deffand was reporting the affair to her friend Horace Walpole in London. Again Montreuil saved Sade from total disgrace. He had begun organising, orchestrating and choreographing private orgies with prostitutes, recruited mostly by his menservants, who sometimes also took part. Sade doubtless enjoyed ...”

“... method they used and escaped punishment. The same story was told in the 18th century, prompting Horace Walpole to coin the word ‘serendipity’ and Voltaire to produce his tale of Zadig. Ginzburg’s Bologna colleague Umberto Eco uses the story at the start of his Name of the Rose, where the monkish detective William of Baskerville, a follower of ...”

“... genre, for Jan Potocki’s remarkable novel. They invoke Gil Blas and the Thousand and One Nights, Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe (Potocki seems to have mentioned doing something ‘à la Radcliffe’), and Cazotte, Beckford, Sade, Charles Nodier and Jules Verne. The blurb to the present translation speaks of an affinity with ‘Stendhal or ...”

“... of 1772 forbade any descendant of George II to marry without the King’s permission. According to Horace Walpole, one man described this Act as ‘a measure giving the Princes of the Blood leave to lie with our wives, while forbidding them to marry our daughters’. And an MP moved that the Bill’s title be changed to ‘an Act for the encouragement of ...”

“... the promiscuous Sir William Beckford, the exceedingly rich Lord Mayor of London who complained to Horace Walpole that the air of Richmond was so bad that 12 of his natural children had died there; to which one can only add that they would have died faster in the West Indies. East of Macaulay’s new town the ducal Bedfords were building up ...”

“... in water and gravel, two great charms’. To judge from such opinions, contemporaries like Horace Walpole and Arthur Young would have regarded the present cult of the country house with amazement and incredulity. Moreover, the life which was actually lived within their walls emerges as far from beguiling. Most country houses were ...”