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“... smashed boards, were a few pages from Pepys, perhaps relating of another London fire, a few from Horace Walpole, urbane among earthquakes, revolutions and wars, knowing that all things pass. But no book remains; my library, with so many other libraries, is gone.’ Indomitably she started to make lists. She listed (‘the saddest list’) the books she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Abbey was George II in 1760. It was the first time chairs were set out for an audience. Horace Walpole recorded that the duke of Newcastle arrived weeping noisily and pretended to faint. When the archbishop of Canterbury offered him smelling salts, the duke leaped up and ran around the church with a spyglass to see who ‘was or was not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... century, we have epistles written in their teens, and from the early twenties (Frances Burney and Horace Walpole). Johnson was born in September 1709; the first letter of Volume I is dated 30 October 1731, when Johnson was 22. There must have been some letters by the younger Johnson – to his relation and benefactor Cornelius Ford, for instance – but ...”

“... types to their coachmen for delivering them too sharply to Ranelagh Gardens where, according to Horace Walpole, it was the done thing to arrive two hours after the music had finished. If you did get to hear any music, you were quite at liberty to talk through it, and if you got really restless you could simply stroll about. For Marsh, as for other ...”