“... he selected at the outset was the great hoard of stale papers compiled by the Tudor statesman, Thomas Cromwell, and fortunately conserved as public property through the accident of Cromwell’s fall. Like Mallory’s Everest, the archive was there, but the circumstances which immersed Elton in it for more than twenty exceptionally fruitful years included ...”

“... By befriending (and from about 1583 employing) the notable mathematician and navigational theorist Thomas Harriot, Ralegh established himself as someone who had the capital, connections and theoretical expertise to exploit the wealth of the Americas. In 1584 he snapped up the patent to colonise ‘remote heathen and barbarous landes’ which had been granted ...”

“... the Interregnum in 1660, Pericles was the first Shakespeare play to be performed, with a youthful Thomas Betterton, aged 25, celebrated in the title role at the Phoenix in Drury Lane. In fact Pericles was more than simply popular: the play became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor ...”

“... for sex) has declined, and in another of which (translated from a Latin epigram by Thomas More, one of Harington’s early Tudor heroes) he has to leave out a word in order to avoid telling his mother-in-law to eat shit. Lady Rogers, unsurprisingly enough, did not make her son-in-law the executor of her will, which led to violent disputes ...”

“... propagated the faith after his death, and of Cobdenite mandarins such as Louis Mallet and Thomas Farrer, is a timely reminder of just how powerfully ingrained liberal commercial values became. Pure Cobdenism was a form of humanitarian cosmopolitanism, based on the international brotherhood of man. Practical Cobdenism, as it evolved in the 1850s and ...”

“... that court life belongs to the realm of serious play (a theme studied to splendid effect by Thomas Greene). The world of the court is rich, splendid, noble; but it is also a hortus conclusus, confining its inhabitants to a narrow space. Early illustrations show the participants in these discussions stiffly lined up in a room of no great size. Court ...”

“... are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna Karenina and tremble at ...”

“... passengers, who included the American tycoon Alfred Vanderbilt and the Welsh mining magnate D.A. Thomas. The German submarine U-20 had already torpedoed three British cargo vessels off the Irish coast. At lunchtime on 7 May its captain, Walther Schwieger, sighted a four-stack passenger liner, clearly British, and dived to intercept her. He fired a single ...”

“... couplets was an achievement unattempted by anyone before and unachieved by anyone since, including Thomas Creech in 1682. Lucy’s first children, twin sons, were born in 1639; she was last pregnant in 1662, so her children may have frequented the schoolroom for rather more than twenty years; her translation of Lucretius could have taken her as long. Though ...”

“... dropped. The manual purports to have been written by the problem letter itself, alias the ‘Hon. Henry H.’ – though putting an unaspirated ‘Hon.’ in front of the name is hardly playing fair with uncertain readers, who might be tempted to aspirate it out of the deference accorded to rank. Having worked her way along the self-help shelf, Mugglestone ...”

“... always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and ...”

“... narrative. She summons back into the annals of the wars the ‘taciturn’ figures the composer Thomas Haswell remembered on the Tyneside of his youth: ‘the sea-dogs of Camperdown, of the Nile, of Trafalgar … in every state of picturesque dismemberment – one arm, one leg, one arm and one leg, or a mere trunk with neither arms nor legs’. Uglow ...”

“... female husbands varied with the state of their relationships. Some wives pressed charges. In 1838, Henry Stoake, an oven builder from Manchester who had lived as a man since his late teens, was exposed by his wife of 22 years. Angry that he was holding back her housekeeping allowance, she sought a legal separation and tried to secure a claim to his assets by ...”

“... capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed Smith, Elder in 1917; between the wars, according to Ian Norrie, Hutchinson ‘absorbed so many imprints that no complete record of them ...”

“... and pays off well: it makes a first-rate anthology. There are a number of poems, by Suckling, Henry King, George Farewell, Andrew Young, which will probably be new to the reader, and which will certainly produce ‘the illusion that it was written specially for me’. There are well-known favourites too, like Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’ and Flecker’s ...”