“... 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 ...”

“... Thorpe’s new biography is that it enables one to sympathise with Eden’s own verdict (after Horace Walpole): ‘Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.’ Eden was a man only too able to feel, trying hard to be someone who only thinks. The tragedy was the greater because not only did he display virtually flawless judgment ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seems to be that revulsion from the martial boy began within months of the Culloden celebrations. Horace Walpole (a great source for O’Keeffe) wrote as early as the summer of 1746 that during a discussion on whether to award the duke the freedom of a City company, one London alderman had said: ‘Then let it be of the Butchers!’ In later ...”

“... where he coached Mansfield in oratory. Among other admiring verses, one of Pope’s Imitations of Horace described Mansfield, still at the bar, as ‘his Country’s pride’. For his part, Mansfield acted as counsel for Pope’s publisher Dodsley in a copyright action to protect Pope’s work from piracy, and Pope, in addition to making him an executor of ...”

“... be controlled and exploited. Unexplained spirit presences soon began to infuse Gothic writing: Horace Walpole argued for The Arabian Nights against the insipid fiction of his contemporaries, and The Castle of Otranto shows its influence.Somewhere between the supernatural, which presumed a belief in God, and the uncanny, which saw ...”

“... of a great courtyard house that had once played host to Elizabeth I. It was already in ruins when Horace Walpole saw it in 1752 and all that now survived was one low range of buildings and a single great tower. Restoring it was a daunting prospect and Harold pointed out that for the same money they could buy an intact house ‘replete with ...”

“... of the planet Venus, however useful in determining the Earth’s distance from the Sun. Horace Walpole ‘waded through’ Hawkesworth’s Voyages to conclude that it lacked ‘entertaining matter’, but Mrs Charlotte Hayes recognised entertaining matter when she saw it and took the liberty of inviting her clients to an observation in ...”

“... are so well perform’d that almost each single hair is express’d’. Later in the century, Horace Walpole pored over a miniature by Isaac Oliver – Hilliard’s brilliant French-born pupil – and found that ‘the largest magnifying glass only calls out new beauties.’The​ 400th anniversary of Hilliard’s death this year has been marked by ...”

“... been ‘echoed’ by William King, Archbishop of Dublin in a work written in 1721. A letter from Horace Walpole to his lifelong friend George Montagu in 1766 is mistaken for one to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom Walpole despised and who died in 1762. Certainly Glendinning has ‘done’ her 18th-century history, but ...”

“... If Classical architecture was developed on paper, Gothic was almost as much paper as structure. Horace Walpole used to joke that his villa at Strawberry Hill, the first important Gothic house, was a paper toy (which was literally true in so far as the ‘battlements’ were made of papier-mâché), but more importantly it was the stuff of ...”

“... you had ‘malaria’. The word entered English usage in the middle of the 18th century: in 1740 Horace Walpole wrote from Rome of ‘a horrid thing called malaria that comes to Rome every summer’. In Italian, malaria meant ‘bad air’, so that its original English usage designated either unwholesome atmospheric conditions – characteristic, for ...”

“... social strata and his outsider’s lack of knowledge of them were a matter for early comment. Horace Walpole called the novels ‘pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller’, and the sentiment was echoed in softer or more considered forms by friend and foe alike. Richardson repeatedly excused himself by appealing to his early ‘narrowness ...”

“... the long and various tradition of verse satire. That tradition has big-name reference points: Horace and Juvenal and Persius and Boileau and Scarron and Pope and Byron. By the late 16th century in England, verse satire deriving from Latin originals had definitely come to be regarded as a distinct literary kind. A century or so later it had become an ...”