“... theatres, parties and country-house weekends. He begins to wonder if he has fallen into a Henry James novel, with Rosemary as the beautiful worldly corrupt European villainness. He turns out indeed to be as spellbound as Chad in The Ambassadors, for when the long-awaited peace-making letter arrives from his wife Roo, he doesn’t answer it. Yet he isn’t ...”

“... the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge shaped the physics of men such as William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and James Clerk Maxwell’. Of course, nobody believes that even Cambridge in the early years of the last century was so inward-looking that the Tripos and Smith’s Prize examinations were the sole influences on ...”

“... tenants, eligible ones complaining that it was too far from London and too obviously sited so that Lord Lytton could drive by with his fashionable guests and point out the evidence of his concern for other writers. There was also the alternative, initiated by the Queen herself, of a nomination to the company of poor brethren at the Charterhouse. Some fifty ...”

“... of mid-life vulnerability and the need to pause, to look back but also ahead – ‘waiting on the Lord’. In the words of James Thurber, ‘all men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.’ The blessing was more disjointed: alternating English and Hebrew by an Episcopalian and a ...”

“... smallest police station (a plinth in Trafalgar Square), its first Greek Revival building (James Stuart’s Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it ...”

“... heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!’; congregations pray, ‘Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings.’ Once or twice only, he misses what would seem to be an obvious literary reference. For instance, in the entry on wardrobe there is no mention of the passage in Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ which tells how the body of a murdered ...”

“... The mythology of the Titanic seems to have been pretty cigar-ridden, even before the poem. Lord’s A Night to Remember reveals that the ship’s Captain allowed you in the room only if you were so still that the blue cloud didn’t move (‘firmness and urbanity’). From Ragtime we learn that the ship’s principal owner, J.P. Morgan, was portrayed ...”

“... under Moses.’ It was as a preacher of ‘free grace’ that Clarkson first made his mark. James Nayler, who is sometimes taken as the leader of a ‘Ranting’ tendency in early Quakerism, was equally known as a defender of ‘the universal free grace of God to all mankind’. Davis passes by, with one glancing reference, Christopher Hill’s ...”

“... force, and, as modern translations make clearer (the Revised Standard Version translates the King James Bible’s ‘time should be no longer’ as ‘there should be no more delay’), it is only when the seventh trumpet sounds that ‘the mystery of God’ will be finished. But Kant, encouraged perhaps by Luther’s translation, was unable to wait. In his ...”

“... anything controversial. Rousseau’s case was promoted by the governor of the principality: Lord Keith, a Jacobite exile and friend of David Hume and James Boswell. Rousseau could hardly have been more fortunate in his protector. For Keith was no longer a fiery Catholic enthusiast for lost causes but a good-natured ...”

“... between social standing and technical skill, the gentlemen and the tarpaulins, in which even Lord Howard could lay a gun, and spoke freely and by name to his ‘poor toiling and continual labouring mariner[s]’; while Drake, in a famous scene which Rodger does his best to run down, not only said, ‘I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the ...”

“... irregular vigour of Jacobin enthusiasm suffering strange emasculation under the hands of a finical lord-chamberlain’. This would become the tone of the second generation of Romantics towards the most despised of their precursors. For Wordsworth, injured love and a sad rebuke for the loss of self-trust; for Coleridge, wonder at what might have been and pity ...”

“... traffic, occasionally lost, and at the end of ‘Fastest on Earth’ she gets a parking fine in St James’s Square. Many of the pleasures are urban and precisely located in the area around Macaulay’s Bloomsbury flat off Chancery Lane, but there are rural pleasures too. In ‘Easter in the Woods’ she contemplates a finely detailed landscape as she lingers ...”

“... or Isidore (‘gift of Isis’), but over time the proportion of ‘Christian names’ like John, James and Peter for men, or Mary, Catherine and Margaret for women, steadily grew. It never became mandatory to have a saint’s name, though by the 15th century an Italian bishop could inveigh against the choice of ‘pagan’ names like Lancelot. The diffusion ...”

“... boys and girls. A year after he admired Mingo’s dancing, Pepys noted in passing that his patron, Lord Sandwich, had acquired ‘a little Turk and a negroe’, who were to be made to work as pages for the earl’s daughters.English involvement in transatlantic slaving expanded significantly during the 1660s, under the enthusiastic leadership of the new ...”