“... figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ‘gamechanger’ of ...”

“... was agreed that England’s competitive advantage could not be allowed to depend on their labour. William Cobbett spoke with an ironic edge in the House of Commons in 1833: A most surprising discovery has been made, namely, that all our greatness and prosperity, that our superiority over other nations, is owing to 300,000 little girls in Lancashire. We had ...”

“... Walpole (one of the earliest kittens to fluster Benson with his friskiness) or Eton masters like William Johnson Cory and Oscar Browning, his fear of sex was so great that he could keep his footing in the ‘precarious trade’ of schoolmastering and avoid that common exile for the too attentive Etonian pederast, a fellowship at King’s. Having chosen to ...”

“... in chalk. In trying to write this biography, the narrator is inspired by the first biography of William Blake, by Alexander Gilchrist, which was completed by Gilchrist’s widow after his death: ‘She had to see if she could imitate his voice.’ The narrator is writing to keep up ‘a topic of conversation’ with Enriqueta. The book’s Spanish title, La ...”

“... on these pages. Wood, in fact, appears nowhere in the book, though Vickers several times cites William Wood, a 17th-century chronicler. Moreover, Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) has lots to say about class hierarchy and the inequalities of wealth; it would be a gross misreading of its argument to say it undervalues social ...”

“... that views such as his have an eminent pedigree within the medical profession itself. The great William Hunter, doyen of the anatomy teachers of 18th-century London, delighted in offering his students a peculiarly chilling vision of the medic’s mentality. Surgeons, he told them, were eaten up with ‘emulation and contention’, operating in a ...”

“... the conflicts’ as they claw their way up the academic ladder. For Marjorie Garber, William R. Kenan Jr Professor of English at Harvard, the university, if not a utopia, is nonetheless a satisfying environment where intellectual controversy reigns. Garber believes that academic jargon is actually ‘language in action’, marking ‘the place ...”

“... list of authors. Lord Byron, David Livingstone, Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart Gladstone, Samuel Smiles, Herman Melville and Washington Irving were all published from Albemarle Street. J.M.W. Turner and David Roberts provided illustrations for Murray ...”

“... scenes evoked purely for their own sake. This returns us to Kleinzahler’s New Jersey precursor, William Carlos Williams, and his deceptively simple rallying cry, ‘no ideas but in things’. Of course the things that get thrown up by the New Jersey landscape are rarely conventionally beautiful, yet many of Kleinzahler’s most compelling poems work by ...”

“... relations in the United States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, Grant’s ‘peace policy’ and Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal – the fact is that whites from ...”

“... gave pain to the bears but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.’ Hahn has it that Colonel Thomas Pride killed the bears of Southwark with his own hands, but other accounts say he had them tied by the noses and shot by militiamen. On his deathbed he is supposed to have said: ‘The first thing that is upon my spirits is the killing of the bears, for ...”

“... Jacobean tragedy, but there were enough of them and of attempted assassinations – the murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous plots, in both his kingdoms, on the life of James VI and I – for threats and rumours of regicide to place nations on recurrent high alert. In life and ...”

“... summer, and a single further number in May 1729. It was written by Jonathan Swift and his friend Thomas Sheridan, a clergyman, schoolteacher and man of letters, and grandfather of the playwright. It includes at least two of Swift’s important works, his critique of the Beggar’s Opera in No 3, and a reprint of the ‘Short View of the State of ...”

“... and estimation, whether the message couldn’t have been delivered a little more crisply. Thomas Carlyle certainly thought so: the poem, he declared, was ‘all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and only wants forgetting’. It is not in fact that easy to tell the story in ten lines – Browning’s most concise ...”

“... living creature of all flesh’. It was in reference to this that the German peasant leader Thomas Müntzer carried a rainbow banner into the battle of Frankenhausen in 1525.As the visitor enters the hold of the ark, sound effects evoke frightened animals in captivity. Soon enough, viewers are presented with animatronic creatures in cages – on closer ...”