“... milieu, in which the unshockable ‘Oh, it is by no means uncommon’ would have been the norm. Henry James’s biography (briefly mentioned here) of the sculptor William Wetmore Story recalls with wonderful wry nostalgia those expatriate Italian circles of the 1850s, ‘that strange sisterhood’ of American ‘lady sculptors’ and ‘the queer ...”

“... is Macaulay, whose brilliant narratives are freer than most of blindness to the Celts. But Henry Hallam, F.W. Maitland and, above all, William Stubbs are presented as the high priests of inveterate Englishism. ‘Despite their immense erudition and their enormous services to the subject, all these scholars positively crowed with nationalistic ...”

“... hardened up what seems to have been hours of musing with Ranson into unfairly selected quotes. In Henry V when the messenger enters and tells the Lord Constable, ‘The English lie within 1500 paces of your tents,’ he asks: ‘Who hath measured the ground?’ The notorious problem with forensic evidence, cold on the page or presented to a jury, is that it ...”

“... flight from the city itself, along with what Defoe might have learned subsequently from his uncle Henry (who remained in London and shares the initials of Defoe’s narrator), compensates for this. Gilman is a superb close reader, which goes a long way to redeeming an often tendentious book. Gilman is at his most persuasive in a powerful reading of Jonson’s ...”

“... from limewood by Grinling Gibbons, which he sometimes wore to answer the door, and a clock that Henry VIII had given to Anne Boleyn. His house was open to visitors if they applied for tickets and Walpole would show them round himself. What it all meant, however, was less easy to see. ‘Horrie’ was described by one of his many detractors as a man who wore ...”

“... Charles James Fox was early hailed as ‘the phenomenon of the age’: an Infant Phenomenon like his chief opponent and perfect foil, William Pitt, who, Fox’s mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan dissipation, already strong on him, did not distract him ...”

“... Presbyterian goals, a tenet that has endured, with a more secular inflection, as Graham Walker and James Greer recognise, in Ulster Protestantism’s contractarian – and seemingly casual – commitment to the rule of law. The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the ...”

“... Auden always in some sense stayed at home: a friend he met after his translation to America, James Stern, later described him as ‘the most unalterably English, the most unlikely expatriate’, and Nicholas Nabokov similarly spoke with affection of Auden’s ‘clumsy laughter, his assertive way of telling not quite exportable (English ...”

“... will appear in the autumn, along with the collected works of Jefferson in one volume, one of four Henry Adams volumes, and one of four Emersons. James will fill eight volumes, and the first, soon to appear, includes Watch and Ward and four other early works. His critical writing will occupy two volumes, which will be not ...”

“... Students of the life and works of Walter Scott and James Hogg may have glimpsed the shadowy, not to say meteoric, not to say dubious presence of the publisher John Macrone, and learned of his prompt desire, after Scott’s death in September 1832, to write his Life, basing it to a large extent on rural informants ...”

“... was the era of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, when the masque was at its extravagant height under James I, and in 1613, around the time this portrait was painted, Lanier composed his first masque song, ‘Bring away this sacred tree’, and performed it at court in The Squires’ Masque. Lanier was looking for advancement and perhaps having his picture ...”

“... deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds Henry Bate and William Jackson, successive editors of the Morning Post, who gave themselves up to sparrings and scandals, and whose journalistic darts were dipped in poison. They were reckless and factional men in a reckless and factional age: E.S. Turner has ...”

“... outrageous performances as a Goon Show script or a night at the music hall. Amos Barking, alias Henry Swansea (the name under which he enlisted in the Civil Service), is a professional liar who in some hard-to-pin-down sense is searching for the truth about himself: in other words, he is our old friend the unreliable narrator. His story, however, is a ...”

“... of election to the House of Representatives on the Whig ticket, the timing was dreadful. President James K. Polk, a Democrat, had just declared war on Mexico. Along with many other Whigs, Lincoln denounced Polk, incurring the charge of disloyalty to the troops. Then the Whig Party confirmed its meretriciousness by nominating Zachary Taylor, a returning ...”

“... Abrahamus Trippie and Jacobus Depre. (The two Jacobi would, of course, be Jacques in French and James in English. Mullett is elsewhere written as Millett, and Trippie as Tippey.) Mountjoy puts up £20 – half of the required bail – to guarantee their appearance at the forthcoming Sessions of the Peace, where they are ‘bound to answere their ...”