“... He first became aware of this paradox, he says, when reading an 18th-century popular song, about a young man who, while staying at an inn, overhears his mistress and her maid in the room next door, where they are sharing a bed and arguing who shall be first to use the chamber-pot. There is no doubt that what Mason is here grasping by a corner is a topic of ...”

“... and reach the mass audience he wanted: but it involved a very real sacrifice – that of his young authentic being. Imagine Lady C telling Mellors in a fit of pique that she had made love to a friend of his, and being ‘forgiven’, much to her fury, as Mr Noon feels it proper to do when his Johanna makes such a malicious confession? Both Gilbert Noon ...”

“... what to do with the caped crusader. Eden, the Foreign Secretary, paid him a private visit, but Edward VIII refused to invite him to Buckingham Palace, and when the former Emperor lunched at the House of Commons, Baldwin hid behind a table to avoid meeting him. As the Conquering Lion of Judah began several miserable years of exile in Worthing, Steer, along ...”

“... a Monk that was believed to be by him was acquired for the Louvre. Numerous artists, including the young Manet, registered requests to copy it. Then, in the following year, the same museum bought the Réunion de portraits, a much acclaimed acquisition, of which Manet made a copy, probably later in the decade (both original and copy are in the exhibition). It ...”

“... of an excommunicated Catholic, buried illegally by night in the chancel of her parish church; of a young man who dressed as a woman to join in the all-female festivities that followed a birth; of horses and cats being baptised; of abortion and infanticide. Cressy is not writing history from below, however. He refers to his lower-class female culprits by their ...”

“... drunk, falls down stairs, gets sacked and never sings on the stage again, but instead enthrals the young John Major with musical evenings in their Brixton tenement. Both the cat burglar and the Jamaican have delicious girlfriends who are probably no better than they should be. The cat burglar’s girl disappeared whenever he went to jail but when he was there ...”

“... Edward Jones – the Burne came later – was born in Birmingham to a mother who died giving birth to him and a father who eked out a living as a frame-maker, although art, his son reported, ‘was always a great bewilderment to him’. The only person who seems to have recognised the boy’s talent – a neighbour who bought pictures to rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner ...”

“... may be legally poured out, dissected and analysed, with effects on the owner to be determined. Edward Snowden made these discoveries, among others, while working as an analyst for the CIA, the NSA and the security outfit Booz Allen Hamilton (whose present vice chairman, Mike McConnell, is a former director of the NSA). Imperialism has been defined as doing ...”

“... Mumford & Sons, the Americana string band Old Crow Medicine Show and alt-rock hipsters Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros as they travelled together by train from Oakland in California, ending up in New Orleans with an inevitable hootenanny-style rendition of ‘This Train Is Bound for Glory’. The song is actually an old gospel ...”

“... gullible people would say: ‘Arthur has come again!’ The ruse didn’t work; Arthur died young, clearing the way for his brother Henry VIII. If, as one of Geoffrey’s English appropriators/ imitators was to declare, Merlin had prophesied that ‘an Arthur should yet come to the help of England,’ it was evidently unwise to try to give Providence a ...”

“... to the messianic age. Menasseh, a rabbi at the Amsterdam synagogue, and probably a teacher of the young Spinoza, figured that the most important pre-messianic event yet to be realised was the readmission of the Jews to England, from where they had been expelled under Edward II in 1290. He argued that the prelude to the ...”

“... the Commonwealth, and Pepys was in the process of transforming himself from a humble factotum to Edward Montagu (the future Earl of Sandwich) into a Clerk of the Acts for the Navy Board – a job which could command informal payments and benefits that vastly exceeded its nominal salary of £350 a year. The diary is the product of a man who felt that both he ...”

“... the unassuming disclaimer that he ‘is not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan’. Edward Said would have explained it as a consequence of imperial power: British travellers and writers have been drawn to South and West Asia for the same reasons French ones ventured to North Africa and the Levant. To an extent, this is surely correct: imperial ...”

“... in every window in Madrid. ‘The voyage of the Knights of adventure’, as the secretary of state Edward Conway called it, finally seemed to be taking off. Buckingham recorded that Charles was in love: ‘Baby Charles is so touched by the heart that he confessed that all he ever saw is nothing to her.’ Poor Charles was not to get the girl. The infanta ...”

“... best poem on TIME’. The best poem not about time might have been more of a challenge, but the young Beckett, for once letting optimism get the better of him, entered with a hastily written 98-line poem, dropped off at Cunard’s office on the competition’s last day. In a letter to Cunard from 1959, Beckett recalls that he ‘wrote first half before ...”