“... on the beach’ was the title of a 19th-century song that has become a saying. ‘Dear Henry,’ William James wrote to his physician friend Henry Bowditch, ‘you see that you are not the only pebble on the beach, or toad in the puddle of senile degeneration.’ ‘What is a pebble?’ is the opening sentence of Clarence Ellis’s book The Pebbles on the ...”

“... his corpse, which allegedly poisoned one of his pall-bearers. By contrast, Protestant writers – William Camden was one – praised his unswerving allegiance to the queen, his tireless dedication to the reformed religion, and his genius as ‘a most subtil searcher of hidden secrets’. Confessional sentiment has continued to colour accounts of Walsingham in ...”

“... pennies for a five-dollar bill.’ Having counted out the pennies, and taken along an anthology of William James for company, Baker was forced to wait at the counter as the manager counted out every penny, ‘while dozens of well-off, exhausted East Siders curled their lips at my somewhat pathetic miserliness’: I reeled to the violently yellow ...”

“... this is a matter of ‘inflation of honours’. Some of it is local yeomen families growing rich: William Ayloffe and Thomas Leggatt, protagonists in the bitterest local feud, both came into this category and both brandished family pews in the face of the parish. Yet, though these families represent economic change within ...”

“... ballad which the opera singer Jenny Lind made wildly popular. Ten years later the great antiquary Thomas Wright published his History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages. Reissued in 1871 as The Homes of Other Days, it contained more than three hundred illustrations drawn from medieval manuscripts by the brilliant engraver ...”

“... novel, Sylvia’s Lovers, set in a whaling community based on Whitby during the Napoleonic Wars; William Golding’s Rites of Passage trilogy (sex and death on a 19th-century merchant vessel); Frankenstein (the scientist and the monster pursuing each other across the Arctic wastes); Dracula (Brownlee dreams of drinking blood out of a shoe; Sumner drinks ...”

“... a frustrated patronage seeker who lay in wait for him at a Washington train station; and in 1901, William McKinley was mortally wounded by an anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. None but Kennedy died immediately (it is quite likely that with modern medical care both Garfield and McKinley would have survived). Kennedy’s death, Steven Gillon ...”

“... There were​ high hopes for the son of Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, the grandson of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, but the boy told his mother that all he wanted was a quiet life and a sailing boat. She wasn’t wholly disappointed at his failure to distinguish himself. When it was suggested at school that he needed to learn to think for himself, Mary Shelley said: ‘Oh God, teach him to think like other people!’ Percy Florence was unusual in a uniformly cerebral family ...”

“... family betrayal: at first of the inheritance of the broad-church Anglicanism of his famous father, Thomas Arnold; and then – not once, but twice – in the danger to his marriage to Julia, the anti-Catholic he had married in New Zealand. Bernard Bergonzi’s description of Thomas Arnold the Younger as a ‘Victorian ...”

“... it was surely unthinkable that the master of Trinity could have pulled the trigger. Or was it? Thomas Gooch, the Tory master of Caius, had in his capacity as vice-chancellor tried to strip Bentley of his degrees. Among all this brouhaha Bentley managed to establish a reputation as the most learned classical scholar in England. Early in his career, after a ...”

“... officer, were both tattooed during their travels, as were members of the mutinous crew of William Bligh’s HMS Bounty, who spent five months in Tahiti in 1789.In 1813, after visiting the Marquesas Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean, the German naturalist Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff wrote:It is undoubtedly very striking that nations perfectly ...”

“... while providing unimaginable riches for a lucky few, from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to William Henry Gates III.Writing about Gates in the LRB in 1999, John Lanchester described him as ‘the apotheosis of the nerd type’. No one, least of all Gates himself, has ever maintained the delusion that his nerdiness somehow makes him cool. (Fifteen or ...”

“... Bering Straits. In the dozen or so years since the death of Geoffrey Elton, the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s prime minister and plenipotentiary, has been similarly airbrushed out of history. Elton, as anyone who did the Tudors for A Levels or read history at Cambridge between 1950 and 1980 knows, made Cromwell the centrepiece of his ...”

“... its weaponry. ‘Do we want to see Hitler in Independence Hall making fun of the Liberty Bell?’ William Bullitt, Roosevelt’s ambassador to France, asked a year before Pearl Harbor. US war planners were already envisioning the utopia to come. Its premise was the defeat of Germany and Japan, but also the break-up of European empires into a world of discrete ...”

“... Shakespeare, of course, though he did well enough out of his commercial interests in the theatre. William Shakespeare was the son of a glover who sold wool on the side. From the later 1570s his father seems to have been losing his status as a civic worthy and falling into debt. In 1582, at the age of 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. By ...”