“... and gives the novel a starred review, praising its ‘charming’ recombination of the styles of Thomas Pynchon and Boris Vian and its ‘tender’, ‘childlike’ depiction of heterosexual love. Jack figures the Kirkus reviewer must be a woman, probably studying French, unduly influenced by Will’s touched-up author photo. Then comes a review in the New ...”

“... woman is a frail thing and of weak discretion.’ ‘I like not a female Poetess at any hand,’ Thomas Powell writes in 1631. Rousseau in 1762 insists that ‘the entire education of women must be relative to men.’ And so on and so on and so on. Doesn’t even Chekhov’s treatment of the bookish wife niggle, in ‘Lady with Lapdog’? Why does he have to ...”

“... The worst of them by far is J.G. Muddiman, a passionate monarchist (and a descendant of Henry Muddiman, known to Pepys as ‘an arch-rogue’, first an apologist for the Rump Parliament and then one of the Restoration’s principal political witchhunters) who edited the trial of Charles I for the Notable British Trials series and whose treatment of ...”

“... of piety never quite cracked. They approached several European rulers for help – including Henry VIII, who would have no truck with them – and in the end reluctantly accepted the only offer going. Malta was an informal part of Charles V’s newly acquired kingdom of Sicily. The main island and its smaller neighbour, Gozo, had very little water. The ...”

“... Air.’The guilty men, apart from the forgers themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding ...”

“... out who Hanabeke is. This is good prose which should be read aloud slowly on the radio (as Dylan Thomas used to read Davies’s Autobiography of a Super-Tramp). Two new English comedies seem wan and sad after these four exuberant, exotic plants. The author of Train to Hell is an Alternative Comedian: that means, the sort that doesn’t make you laugh. He ...”

“... as births and the party ‘gossipings’ which followed births and churchings – though in 1633 Thomas Salmon of Great Tew dressed up as a woman so that he could join the female fun after a delivery. Advice for mothers and midwives, and the offences and disputes which arose over births, can, however, open even the door of the birthroom to curious ...”

“... with an issue opposite to that which we expect from it. There is here a large scope for gloom. Thomas Hardy was particularly fond of exhibiting in this section what he called life’s little ironies. That gives the flavour of Stewart’s view of how things grow. Mary would brush irony aside as if it were one of those numerous young men – Forrest Crosbys ...”

“... Mann’s affidavit, which stated that he was on his way to Princeton to meet up with his father Thomas, and said he was ‘honoured to make the acquaintance of the son of so great a man’. Varian Fry was a stiff, rather priggish man, a spoilt only child who manipulated his parents with fake illnesses, was bullied at school and became known as a prankster ...”

“... rhetoric of patriots than those of the early 18th-century British journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon or the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. After 1776, in any case, Locke’s influence as a political philosopher declined sharply. By the 1780s Americans of the founding generation were much more likely to invoke the ideas of Montesquieu or William ...”

“... Sea during the debates that immediately preceded the British-Irish Union. The Scottish politician Henry Dundas, an admirer of Smith and the prime mover behind the union, advanced an anti-feudalist rationale for British-Irish integration; and there were also echoes of Smith among Irish unionists, with Thomas Brook Clarke ...”

“... the Lord Coke from the place he now holdeth to be Chief Justice of England, and the Attorney [i.e. Henry Hobart] to succeed him, and the Solicitor [i.e. Bacon] the Attorney.First, it will strengthen the King’s causes greatly amongst the judges. For my Lord Coke will think himself near a Privy Councillor’s place, and thereupon turn obsequious.Secondly, the ...”

“... process gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... between the places where the earliest ‘Robinhood’ surnames are found, is the huge honour of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (1298-1322), stretching right across Northern England, and down through the Midlands to Sussex. Building on this vital clue, Holt goes on to resolve the peasant-gentleman debate by dissolving it. The word ‘yeoman’ in the later Middle ...”

“... fiascos of psychohistory’, Gay seeks allies among orthodox social historians. Thus Keith Thomas is praised – for ‘speaking Freud without knowing it’. What a pity that, in a letter excerpted in the notes, Thomas distances himself from ‘the Master’. What a shame that Edmund Morgan, having learned so much ...”