“... forger called Gabriel Varney, who was reworked from elements in the life of the forger-poisoner Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Bulwer-Lytton was the most distinguished of the sensationally popular Newgate novelists. His closest rival, Harrison Ainsworth, managed nothing more than romantic escapism with a thick accretion of historical allusions. Bulwer-Lytton ...”

“... the minister in charge of the coal industry, was ‘a second-rate, slow-witted sheepshead’. Thomas Kennedy, a veteran Labour MP, was ‘only a walking corpse, with a faint residue of mental trouble’. The Labour peer Lord Faringdon was ‘a pansy pacifist of whose private tendencies it might be slander to speak freely’. So much for personal spite. On ...”

“... of his biographer. The broad conceptual sweeps that went into writing ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’ are also ones in which Maitland did not much indulge. Where the two historians are closest is in their picture of Parliaments, what they were, and what they were for, and Maitland’s famous essay on ‘Memoranda de Parliamento 1305’ calls ...”

“... almost exclusively at the power politics of theocracy, except for a few eccentrics such as Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. Theocratic failure and national defeat took place before the first signs of intellectual innovation. The most interesting 17th-century forerunner of the 18th-century efflorescence is Stair, whose Institutions captivate by their simple ...”

“... of the annus mirabilis, 1650, with its heresiarchs, prophets and messiahs, with John Robins and Thomas Tany, with its ‘witchcraft fits’ and speaking with tongues, provided the odium of example which sobriety needed. Davis has therefore written a book which is silly and unnecessary. No one has ever pretended that the Ranters were organised, as ...”

“... has an unfailingly good eye for anecdote and a line in sarky parenthesis – on such things as William Davenant’s pox-rotted nose – worthy of a stand-up comedian. Although it will find a home in that dreariest of Dewey Decimal deserts – the public reference section – this book is fun. But it will not help the ambitious undergraduate pass his/her ...”

“... of London, of which Pyne wrote part, was dominated by the illustrations of A.C. Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson. In so far as it has an authorial voice it is that of the publisher Rudolph Ackermann among whose many inventions The Microcosm could also be counted as the first coffee-table book, published from 1808 to 1810 for a polite but not exclusively ...”

“... entrée to great households, and could be induced to spy on their patrons. Marlowe’s patron was Thomas Walsingham, the great spymaster’s nephew. Beyond this, he had the friendship of powerful men. One was Lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby. He belonged to the Stanley family, whose power-base was in Lancashire, a part of England famous for clinging to ...”

“... ideological weapons against Russian ‘barbarism’ and the ‘superficial’ British and French. Thomas Mann’s Observations of a Non-Political Man, published in 1916, is the prize exhibit of historians concerned to pin down this pattern of thinking. The same mental set has often been viewed as an important enabling element in the coming of National ...”

“... debate seems quaint and unpromising, as if he hadn’t heard of recent developments. His target is Thomas Kuhn, and he wants to rebut the claim that the history of science is punctuated by Kuhnian revolutions. Kuhn’s famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions contains a final, worried, chapter, in which he tries to find a viable conception of scientific ...”

“... wasn’t unprecedented: Lincoln presented the arguments of the Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison in the 1836 presidential campaign.) In a 1948 primary campaign, Harold Stassen and Thomas Dewey debated the outlawing of the American Communist Party on national radio. The idea of a televised ...”

“... Noye’s Fludde, and they were in peril when the words of that hymn were written in 1860 by William Whiting. A poem can let you step into a moment that is always – or as Culler puts it in his not always light-footed prose – lyric ‘is not the description and interpretation of a past event but the iterative and iterable performance of an event in ...”

“... in the US and abroad; American Dreamers (2011), about the 20th-century left; and a biography of William Jennings Bryan, published in 2006, which attempted to rescue its protagonist from what E.P. Thompson in a different context called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. (Condescension regarding Bryan emanates from secular urban liberals who know ...”

“... I reveal to you how best to install Word on your computer, I don’t lose that ability myself. As Thomas Jefferson put it nearly two hundred years ago, ‘he who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.’ Software, like ideas, is ...”

“... illustrious wisdom of the Great Cham. This case was most damagingly pressed in the 19th century by Thomas Babington Macaulay, who saw Boswell as a wine-bibbing, plate-licking reprobate, the very smallest of men, who somehow wrote a great biography by accident. This view has been corrected somewhat by the serial publication of Boswell’s private papers, which ...”