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“... of literary fraud. One of his first publications, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782), takes sixty exhaustive pages to demolish those who still believed that Chatterton’s poems were genuinely medieval, and his edition of Shakespeare devotes thirty more to discrediting a feeble pseudo-Jacobean pamphlet published forty years ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... masses closer home, Britons all – as earlier he had made common cause with his unloved brother William against the Manchester street boys. Or he might deal with the threat of the eastern Other by ‘inoculating’ himself, for example by taking opium, an oriental substance, and with its aid protect himself against dreams of oriental barbarity, though it ...”

“... settlement in Botany Bay in 1788. A second copy, rather less worthy, travelled on the Bounty with William Bligh and was taken by the mutineers to Pitcairn Island. Hence Umberto Eco playfully suggests at the end of his own recent longitude novel, The Island of the Day Before, that the documents on which his story is based must have been found by Bligh while ...”

“... in operatic performances in England’. Here and there are flashes of the later Shaw. He describes William Carter’s cantata, Placida, as ‘eminently inoffensive. It constantly refreshes the listener with reminiscences of familiar masters.’ A little later, Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser holds the audience seated ‘despite the loss of the express at ...”

“... Eliot’s fingerprints are all over this book). There is a dream of a music lesson taught by William Byrd, a history of English poetry in the manner of one of Blake’s prophetic books, and a perambulation of London in which Hogarth repeats passages of The Analysis of Beauty and marches Timothy through the scenes of his engravings of London life. Most ...”

“... There is a story that when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming ‘Hi, Norman!’ in the Index, next to Mailer’s name. A similar tactic might happily have been ventured by the publishers of Philip Larkin’s Letters: the book’s back pages are going to be well-thumbed ...”

“... Preface goes to ‘King Finow of Tonga’. Finau’s words were spoken to a beachcomber, William Mariner, who had written his name down on a piece of paper as ‘Feenow’. Another beachcomber read it out loud. Finau snatched the paper, looking for himself. ‘This is neither like myself nor anybody else. Where are my eyes, where is my head? Where ...”

“... independently in different historical periods. In The Cuckqueanes and Cuckolds Errants (c. 1601), William Percy used a double parenthesis in a speech by Pearle to suggest a pearl within an oyster; and in the novel Foe (1986) J.M. Coetzee wrote of storytelling: ‘Teasing and braiding can, like any craft, be learned. But as to determining which episodes hold ...”

“... moving to a peak, or more usually a series of mountains or molehills, before going into decline. William Pitt the Younger is the great exception. Because of his parentage and abnormal abilities he began at the top. Entering the House of Commons at the age of 21, which was by law the minimum age, although Charles James Fox had earlier been ‘elected’ when ...”

“... it were sentenced to instant execution. But to say incoherent is not always to say inexplicable. William Calley, known to his commanding officer (evidently an early aficionado of Catch-22) as Lieutenant Shithead, finally faced a court martial for the massacre by his platoon in 1968 of the population of the Vietnamese village of My Lai. He was convicted and ...”

“... bypass round Locke. It concentrated instead on a set of debates among such obscure antiquaries as William Petyt, James Tyrrell, William Atwood and Robert Brady. Late 17th-century Englishmen, it transpired, were less concerned with a hypothesised original contract between monarch and people than with the question of whether ...”

“... Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled William III and the Dutch fleet to stage a successful invasion in 1688 and disrupt the country yet again. Domestic strife and European enemies also restricted the navy’s enterprise in non-European waters before 1750, and so too did its own flaws. An expensive ...”

“... American spinster Meta Brevoort undertook many difficult climbs with her doting teenage nephew, William Coolidge, who grew up to be a cantankerous pedant, feared by all. One woman climber married a Chamonix guide, and her two sons could hardly wait to ascend Mont Blanc, one at the age of 13, the other 11. Strangely, neither of these books mentions what ...”

“... What should we mean by ‘Reformation’? Was it a ‘paradigm shift’ of the kind proposed by Thomas Kuhn, a new set of answers to old questions, a Darwinian moment? Perhaps. For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose Reformation was published in 1996, it was not so much an event in the 16th century, or even an extended process, as a constant manifestation of the spirit of Christianity, at least from 1500 to the present day, ‘a continuing story, embracing the common religious experiences of Christians of different traditions worldwide ...”