“... 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 ...”

“... of her clothes, and disguised themselves in her likeness at fancy-dress parties. According to Horace Walpole, mid-century masquerades were overrun with ‘dozens of ugly Mary Queen of Scotts’, including on one occasion the Princess of Wales herself, ‘covered with diamonds’. Some of these women also wrote accounts of Mary’s life and ...”

“... Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates detailed ...”

“... while they recited huge chunks of Cicero. The centres of Ramsay’s world were Magdalen, Eton and Horace. And his Horace clearly went to Eton and Magdalen. The period from 1680 to 1730 was the critical stage at which English Neo-Latin verse declined into donnishness. There was no reduction in the volume of Latin verse ...”

“... need to say so in print.’ Many said it in private. Mitchell follows Lock in citing some of them: Horace Walpole, though generally antagonistic to Burke, thought it ‘the wisest book I ever read in my life’, read it twice within ten days of publication, and praised it in letter after letter for having ‘given a mortal stab to sedition’, and for ...”

“... Horace Walpole’s​ Strawberry Hill was the first private house to be built in the Gothic style. It began modestly in 1747 as a suburban riverside villa near Twickenham, leased to a Mrs Chenevix who ran a novelty shop at Charing Cross. Gradually it was transformed into what Walpole, wilfully misquoting Pope, referred to as a Gothic Vatican ...”

“... called her home. The rounds of the newspaper were not a bit more regular or certain.’ And Horace Walpole christened her the Morning Post, after a Private Eye of the time. She took as her second husband the rogue politician Charles Townshend, who seems to have married her for money and influence, and to have gone in fear of her female ...”

“... friends, and may have hoped through her influence to secure the patronage of the Prime Minister Walpole. There was no love lost between Walpole and the Scriblerians either, and Fielding’s fluctuating attitudes to them are sometimes inverse indicators of where Fielding stood (or wanted to stand) with ...”

“... to whom he addressed star-struck letters as a foot-soldier in the ‘patriot’ opposition to Walpole. Hill’s connections provided Brewster with an alibi for her potentially ‘criminal’ interest in him; her book is built around two long chapters on his dealings with Pope and Richardson. Gerrard, too, is interested in Hill as much for who he knew as ...”

“... 17th-century Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken, who had worked in London in the 1690s. Thanks to Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762), Schalcken was known in Wright’s time for dimly lit, erotic scenes, which were considered both indelicate and artistically glib, reliant on obvious visual tricks. (...”

“... satires for which he is mainly remembered, but also much else: imitations (sometimes brilliant) of Horace, Ovid and other Latin poets, as well as of Greek poets, and Boileau and Voiture; ‘Pindarique’ odes of elaborate stanzaic architecture; and poems of Rochesterian obscenity. Oldham is (with Dryden and Rochester) one of the three considerable satirists of ...”

“... in peaceful Northern waters, and he was lavishly praised by Priestley, Harold Nicolson, Hugh Walpole, Storm Jameson and Sean O’Faolain. So what else did the poor man want? He wanted to be deeply admired. He wanted to be rated a most excellent and serious writer by the most exacting and serious critics. I never thought of him in that way, although he ...”