“... these are as marvellously implausible as, for example, the expression ‘in fine’ – perhaps Henry James might be a candidate if we accepted that criterion. F. Bastian, in his book on Defoe’s early life, makes attributions on the basis of (inter alia) certain ‘Defoisms’ which turn out to include tags such as hinc illae lachrymae. Such items of ...”

“... partisanship; Penny Wilson on the vast readership for Classical poetry; Isabel Rivers and Thomas Preston on the still vaster religious reading public; J.V. Price on philosophical literature and G.S. Rousseau on the science book in the period. But when all the nice things are said and done, Books and their Readers in 18th-Century England has the ...”

“... of plain speech grew up in radical circles well before Political Justice advocated sincerity. Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton, who died in 1789, caused far more havoc than ever Godwin did by acting the noble primitive in the drawing-room. But Godwin’s journal also notes a succession of temporary estrangements, after excoriating scenes which he ...”

“... opposition. The alternative political economy of labour was articulated with notable cogency by Thomas Hodgskin: ‘The distress our people suffer, ‘he contended, ‘and the poverty we all complain of, is not caused by nature, but by some social institutions.’ Economic progress, in short, was bound up with particular social arrangements, and shaped by ...”

“... revelation, and a virtual doctor of the Church, expounding theology with supreme authority – ‘Thomas Aquinas in drag’, as one critic called her. All the while she remains the same Florentine lady he cherished on Earth.Throughout his life, Dante engaged in an audacious project of self-exegesis and self-correction. The Vita Nuova anthologises his earlier ...”

“... by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy ...”

“... along with Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, but the most important new acquaintance was the novelist Thomas Flanagan, who later wrote The Year of the French. ‘When I landed in California,’ Heaney says, ‘my head was still basically wired up to English Literature terminals … When I left, thanks mostly to Tom’s brilliantly sardonic Hibernocentric ...”

“... an unhealthy degree of co-dependency between politicians and journalists. When the sketch-writer Henry Lucy first joined the parliamentary corps of the Daily News in the late 1860s, the ‘authorities … regard[ed] the Press as an intruder’. When, around the same time, Wemyss Reid, later editor of the Leeds Mercury, joined the press gallery he discovered ...”

“... is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s appreciation. He received instead one of the rings of which Byron kept a plentiful supply to distribute to admirers. Noel was used to disappointment. An illegitimate cousin of ...”

“... of any specific technology. In 1676, he went to see the Duke’s Company perform Thomas Shadwell’s lampoon of Royal Society ‘virtuosi’ and was mortified because he was convinced it was so obviously directed at him that the audience ‘almost pointed’. Shadwell’s virtuoso was concerned only with the ‘speculative part’ of ...”

“... by Matthew Parris. Thatcher’s was a court and her courtiers just as cowardly as the courtiers of Henry VIII, and one can imagine some 16th-century Lord Butler justifying his master much as Tebbit and Bell are doing this evening. ‘It was unfortunate, of course, but the second wife had to go. She was impossible and yet, you see, His Majesty was genuinely ...”

“... gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets’. As these few tasters from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais indicate, swearing can be fun: ‘slabberdegullion druggels’ (slovenly dimbos) and ‘noddie meacocks’ (limp-wristed wimps) have the surreal energy of abuse forged in the heat. But Urquhart’s list of obscenities ...”

“... in the Rocky Mountains. On the advice of the State Department, the US Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau selected the lavish Mount Washington Hotel in the small New Hampshire village of Bretton Woods. The hotel, the largest building in the state, was theoretically well suited to house the 730 delegates, representing 44 countries, that Roosevelt had ...”

“... years before the Battle of Waterloo. As a teenager, through the influence of his elder brother, Thomas, himself a gifted artist and architect, Paul Sandby was taken on as a military draftsman for the Board of Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many ...”

“... Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a funny ...”