“... come back soaked. ‘Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain’: if anything, I’d say, Thomas understates. The nine men’s morris would be fill’d with mud, if the local farmer had left it. But he’s an improver who roots up hedgerows and demolishes old cottages. Not long ago, he gassed his badgers and bulldozed their set. They used to bring up ...”

“... Cruikshank, like Giorgione, could be read on many different planes, just as a cartoon featuring Henry Fox and labelled ‘Volpone’ could be appreciated by those who had never heard of Ben Jonson. Yet if cartoons assuredly were not ‘high art’, they certainly must not be seen as part of the ‘little tradition’. Cartoons were an expression of that ...”

“... for more than twenty years now. The name, at once plain and elusive, might have appealed to Henry James. The echoes of ‘maiden’ and ‘evading’ are particularly apposite, for despite starting her sexual life at the age of 13, Kate remains virginal in a more important sense, never fully giving herself to anyone, always holding back from any ...”

“... She lives, Master Shallow. The italicised words, found in the Folio, are not in the Quarto of Henry IV, published in 1600 – a text almost certainly derived from Shakespeare’s autograph. The fuller text can therefore be taken either as evidence of revision, or as suggesting that the printers of the Quarto for some reason omitted the italicised ...”

“... for Grand Tourists or other wealthy travellers to more exotic lands. In 1799, for example, when Thomas Girtin was nearing the height of his fame as a landscape ‘genius’, Lord Elgin offered him £30 a year to carry out a pictorial survey of Greek monuments in what was then Turkish territory; ‘and as lady Elgin possessed a taste for drawing’, a ...”

“... by stagecoach). Many were perennially ‘briefless barristers’, as Austen’s lawyer nephew Henry put it, ‘haunted’ every day by the refrain of their desperate clerks: ‘I should be glad, sir, of some work.’Discussions of social mobility during this period have tended to focus on movement up the scale. For struggling younger sons from ...”

“... Thomas​ Hobbes used to tell people that the Spanish Armada was the reason he had been born prematurely. ‘My mother gave birth to twins,’ he said, ‘myself and fear.’ He never shook off the sense of dread. More than half a century later, having fled England for France, he wrote Leviathan, predicated on the view that fear is the chief driver of man ...”

“... o’clock salons – known as ‘a Menagerie of Live Authors’ – introduced her to the work of Thomas Paine, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. Johnson taught her to ‘offend, alienate and strenuously disagree’ in her unsigned pieces for his monthly Analytical Review; with his encouragement she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of ...”

“... plantation to be shared out between the dead man’s relatives.In 1834, Douglass’s new master, Thomas Auld, a mean ‘object of contempt’, believing his authority was being challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in ...”

“... Bayreuth. In 1924, the Wagners went on a fund-raising trip to America, during which they solicited Henry Ford’s aid for Hitler while at the same time trying to appease Jewish Americans, whose money they needed to help them reopen the festival. But Siegfried goofed by ranting against ‘Jewish-Communist swine’ at a dinner for wealthy guests; refusing to ...”

“... though he didn’t make the most successful film made according to Dogme principles, which was Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen – wasn’t really a vow of chastity but of poverty, since any film made according to the principles would come in cheap. Disowning the kitsch manipulativeness of Hollywood style was a strategic way of claiming the moral high ground ...”

“... whole Church. Towns, children, parishes and days of the year were named for them. Even as late as Henry V the Battle of Agincourt was remembered as St Crispin’s day, after an obscure patron of cobblers and tanners, and Oxford still has its Hilary Term. Commemorated on 14 January, Hilary of Poitiers was a distinguished theologian, but the Legend takes more ...”

“... and potential employer, Cosimo de’ Medici. The same day, the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, sent a copy to James I, describing it as ‘the strangest piece of news (as I may justly call it)’ that he would ever have received ‘from any part of the world’. Most copies were probably sent over the Alps by Tommaso Baglioni, the book’s ...”

“... questions of quality and value. This, once more, is a thoroughly traditional moral project, which Thomas Aquinas would have had no trouble in recognising. Moralism and idealism must be refuted, and the question of what we ought to do must somehow be anchored in the way it is with us. But the spectre of reductionism is not simple to exorcise, and it is easier ...”

“... and a puzzle, since it should appeal to an English-speaking public addicted to Jane Austen and Henry James, with both of whom Fontane has many broad similarities. At 17, Effi is married off to the civil servant Baron Geert von Innstetten, whom her mother once loved but rejected in order to marry Effi’s father, a man of higher rank. Effi is pleased with ...”