“... in either medium could achieve. Gillray’s first ambition was to be a reproductive engraver (Richard Godfrey suggests in the catalogue that he failed because he could never avoid exaggerating, if only a little). He possessed a combination of technical abilities which no modern caricaturist can match: a good grasp of anatomy, a fine way with drawn drapery ...”

“... lies an important earlier collection, the work published in 1972, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, as Household and Family in Past Time. This book established the remarkable constancy of average household size in England since the 16th century, despite people’s mobility, with a norm of a little under five persons until the low birth rate and ...”

“... Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the years (1925 and 1928 respectively) lie like little marble asps, waiting to keep their dates. Who knows what decided the cemetery ...”

“... Perfection, Inevitability, Modesty, Carefulness; and the reflections Youngest Son, Dog, Hand, Stone, Green, Early Spring, North-East.Any two trigrams can be brought together to form a hexagram in two different ways. Combining Earth (Kun) and Lake (Dui), for example, produces the hexagrams:GatheringOverseeing☱☷☷☱LuiLinIn all, 64 hexagrams can be ...”

“... paint either lion or face so decided to keep the ones he found. In Master of the Two Left Feet, Richard Meyer tries to show that these compositional strategies actually reveal Hirshfield’s knowledge of art history and the way paintings work. The vogue in the 1930s and 1940s for unknown, native and ‘primitive’ art means that Hirshfield is remembered ...”

“... the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane, would be much exercised by the discovery of the body of Richard III, though there would be some mild satisfaction in finding the king exactly where the sources said he was. McFarlane wouldn’t have thought the body particularly informative as compared with the real stuff of history, some of the ex-duke of York’s ...”

“... of Shrewsbury should have given such sound pastoral advice to the founders of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams and his gang of merry chums: these old boys have shamed their old school, making it a byword. Shrewsbury, as Simon Raven notes, is now notorious for shrewishness. Grand old school-stories have furnished Raven with many quotes and ...”

“... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...”

“... a Mistress Greffine or Griffin, and among its frequent guests was a Stratford businessman called Richard Quiney. From here, on 25 October 1598, Quiney wrote a short letter addressed on the verso ‘To my Loveinge good ffrend & contreymann Mr Wm Shackespere’ – the only item of Shakespeare’s correspondence to survive. It is a request for a loan of ...”

“... migrants featured pagan symbols (Odinn’s raven, Thor’s hammer) on their coins. Unlike Anglian stone crosses of the eighth century, authentic banners of a transformed faith, Northumbrian sculpture after the Danish settlement drew copiously on pagan myth and heroic legend. This last point is one of many significant things to emerge from ...”

“... from the Dark Ages. ‘The county of Suffolk offers the nearest approach to an epitome of the Stone Age of man that is probably to be found in the whole world,’ according to the Victoria County History. Assessing the poetry of the Suffolk poet George Crabbe in The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt wrote: There are here no ornaments, no flights of fancy, no ...”

“... bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that outlaw behaviour had apparently cast on the youth of America. In a characteristically sideways rhetorical manoeuvre, he began with a ...”

“... a swansong of passivity in the drawing-room; and, above all, the opera libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Arabella. These, I would say, constitute half a safety-net, half a ball and chain, meaning that Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) won’t ever go away. All the same, when ...”

“... would be more.The site of the Tudor palace had been a locus of human activity and power since the Stone Age. A timber fortress stood there, on the banks of the River Loddon with views across the valley, from the 12th century until 1531, when Henry VIII granted William Paulet a licence to rebuild. A feudal castle evolved into a stately home fit for ...”

“... designed it was a miracle of discretion, because the artist himself emerges nowhere from the stone. A worshipping lady emerges in bas-relief, and is largely concealed behind a bush. One could do worse than to recommend a similar modesty to artists at large, wherever they may temporarily hide. Verlaine did not suffer from it. He scowls down at us from the ...”