“... is the Wilcote chapel, a fan-vaulted two-bayed chantry of exquisite perfection. In it lies Sir William Wilcote, MP for Oxfordshire under Richard II and Henry IV, who died in 1411. He is shown in alabaster armour, with a collar of SS (the Lancastrian badge), his eagle coat of arms on his jupon and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich ...”

“... was somehow the cause of the war.’Neiman mentions the so-called Dunning School, named after William Dunning, a professor at Columbia at the turn of the 20th century, who, with his followers, disparaged the efforts made during the Reconstruction to establish the civil and economic rights (forty acres and a mule) of former slaves and gave intellectual ...”

“... As the (again, literally) middle-man Mr W.H. and the publisher T.T. (whom we know to be Thomas Thorpe) render back to the poet ‘that eternity promised by our ever-living poet’ himself, so do the inscriptional lineation and syntax work to involve the three men in a three-in-one, one-in-three pattern of mutual good. The dedicatory inscription ...”

“... salutary way from that of the judge who in 1797 directed the jury trying Tom Paine’s publisher, Thomas Williams, for blasphemy that the Christian religion was part of the law of England. In these and endless other ways, the UK’s constitution changes constantly, blown by winds of which the actors are barely aware. Who today would like to be heard saying ...”

“... globalisation as a revolutionary force in the late 1990s, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman became a guru to corporate chieftains from Bangalore to Atlanta with his argument that neutering government, American-style, and deregulating economies were necessary and inevitable steps on the path to a ‘flat world’. After 9/11, George ...”

“... numbers, Origen, the Great War, puns, madrigals, nail-making, Nye Bevan, biplanes, God, Thomas Bradwardine, Platonism, Messiaen, hawthorns, forgotten martyrs, Iceland, the Virgin, Welsh history, laurels, prophecy, cabalism). The instant sources of delight are lines that reverberate in the mind (‘A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost ...”

“... In March​ 1718, 13-year-old William Murray, the 11th of Viscount Stormont’s 14 children, set off from the family seat at Scone, near Perth, on a pony. The journey to London, which he made alone, took him almost two months, and it is probable that he never saw Scotland again. Although it was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone as a scholar ...”

“... and always a domineering presence in the dining room. One friend of Johnson’s from Liverpool, William Roscoe, enjoyed the conversational rough and tumble more than his wife, Jane, who resented having to tiptoe round Fuseli’s vanity and did not think that his ‘merit as an artist’ was enough to justify his behaviour. For Johnson, who was often ...”

“... of Indiana University, whose principal work extended from the 1930s to the 1960s. We learn of William Lee, sanitary reformer and colleague of Edwin Chadwick, who found his match in the equally expansive (canon-wise) James Crossley – a more cautious and cunning operator, the extent of whose activities as a corpus-sweller has not been fully apparent until ...”

“... dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a number of breaches of the Official Secrets Act which ...”

“... removal of the chains of lunatics at Bicêtre, and the establishment of the York Retreat by William Tuke, inaugurate the psychiatric enlightenment. The development of the asylum bears witness to the increasing ability to distinguish between the mad and the poor, idle and criminal classes, and to attempts by various reformers, notably the Tukes and John ...”

“... price of standards is eternal vigilance.’ Contingency and struggle were the drivers of Thomas Pynchon’s great metrological novel Mason & Dixon, as they are of Crease’s book, whose special strength is attention to the last several decimal places of modern measurements, how they were arrived at through the 19th and 20th centuries, why and to whom ...”

“... such as Belgravia and St James’s Magazine, spawned by John Maxwell, or the vulgar publisher William Tinsley’s Tinsley’s Magazine, in which Thomas Hardy had his first success with the serial of A Pair of Blue Eyes. (Houghton’s explanation for not indexing these three journals is revealing: ‘they consist ...”

“... between himself and Mailer, himself and Capote, himself and Tennessee Williams, or himself and William Buckley. Rather, we learn, not without preceding markers but in many ways for the first time, about Vidal’s family and about the Kennedy branch of it. We come to understand how divided a self he is; not just as between love and death but as between ...”

“... on 42nd Street, then one as a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar. A couple of years later, William Shawn hired her to write the ‘briefly noted’ reviews of historical novels and murder mysteries for the New Yorker.I asked people at the office who had known Maeve what she looked like when she arrived (strangely, I hadn’t been able to find any ...”