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“... greatness and purpose, through the values elicited from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin ...”

“... usury. Within prescribed limits as to the level of interest, it had been legal since the time of Henry VIII, but it was a sin, and best left to the inhabitants of the ghetto, though they too were forbidden by their religion to practise it, except (Deuteronomy 23.20) on strangers. That Shakespeare wants the audience to be thinking about these matters is ...”

“... had been cut off. It turned out to be a false economy on the Duke’s part. Yet to say, as James Laver did, introducing the 1929 edition, that there was ‘no creative impulse’ behind the Memoirs is quite untrue. Once she got going Harriette Wilson clearly wrote for the pleasure of writing. Many of the people she depicts are obscure; she simply ...”

“... unusual is that he seems barely to adjudicate significance; he’s like a child who has taken Henry James’s injunction to novelists – ‘be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’ – literally; he appears to just write down everything he can recall (and he appears to recall everything). It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My ...”

“... then on jurisprudence, between 1748 and 1751. The prime mover behind the lectures was the advocate Henry Home (soon to be elevated to the judicial bench as Lord Kames), a sharp reminder, not least to Smith’s modern-day devotees, of the significant role played by patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, nepotism thrived in the academic dynasties of ...”

“... which Protestant England could never hope to lay claim (although before the separation from Rome Henry VIII had made a somewhat forlorn bid to have himself elected Holy Roman Emperor). But if the British Empire could not hope to rival the prestige of Spain, it could compete on an equal footing in the Americas. As one spokesman for the Virginia Company put ...”

“... 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 royalty, said to be ‘the greatest of any subject’s house in England’. Its nickname, Loyalty House – after the marquess of Winchester’s motto ...”

“... omits.Crippen, meanwhile, was turning into a spiv. By early 1894, he had started working for James Monroe Munyon, a ‘professor’ – the title was his own – who made his fortune selling ‘Munyon’s Remedies’, which he advertised as ‘a cure for every disease’. Crippen was soon transferred to the head office in Philadelphia, where he was one ...”

“... his twenties he discovered the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and some time later the novels of Henry James. He liked to read and now began to write for publication – humorous essays and sketches at first, in the manner of Robert Benchley. ‘I dislike night life and clubs,’ he told a friend in a letter. He refused to push to the front of the line ...”

“... However you construe the evidence, Cambridge was a victim of what the historian of slavery James Walvin calls ‘plantocratic revenge’: legal or irregular retribution – whipping, shackling, lynching – that was used to punish rebellious behaviour or to make an example of someone in order to deter revolt. ‘Scratch a planter,’ Walvin ...”

“... Few​ today remember Captain Henry Hill (1812-82), a military tailor turned quartermaster of the First Sussex Rifle Volunteers. According to the Brighton census of 1881, Hill, who was then in his late sixties, lived on ‘funded property’ at 53 Marine Parade with his wife, Charlotte; his 27-year-old nephew, James; and three servants ...”

“... his African homeland, Tony Small watched a battle.’ The original readers of Scott and G.P.R. James would have responded to that opening sentence. Tony Small is a young black slave who escaped when the war compelled his owners to abandon their house and plantation near Charleston. Scavenging by night among the human wreckage of the battlefield, he comes ...”

“... sphygmomanometers that had become available for the accurate measurement of blood pressure. Sir James Mackenzie, the patron, and Thomas Lewis, the leader of the scientific school and as much a physiologist as a physician, still held that ‘the trained finger’ was the best instrument for measuring arterial pressure. Science made perhaps its first ...”

“... of a fashion among American writers, usually when resident in or recently returned from Europe. Henry James’s long list of negatives applied to Hawthorne’s America (‘no sovereign, no court ... no church, no clergy ... no palaces, no castles ... no Epsom nor Ascot’) is only the most famous instance of the trope. But competing with this theory of ...”

“... in the Chinese film industry). Undeterred, in February last year Bob Seeley, a Tory MP, and James Rogers of the Henry Jackson Society, a right-wing think tank, published a pamphlet called Global Britain: A Blueprint for the 21st Century. This suggested, among other things, that the £300 million bill for the BBC World ...”