“... who, as Claire put it in a letter, ‘looked daggers at the dear old man’. Others saw more in Peacock. Shelley met him through Hookham in 1812, and brought him into his social circle: a circle united by religious scepticism and political radicalism, though each member had ‘nevertheless some predominant crotchet of his or her own, which left a ...”

“... in as a troubleshooter to deal with the privies at Theobalds and Hampton Court. Harington was much more than a hygienist, however. Indeed, most of his works try to achieve rather too much at once. The Metamorphosis of Ajax is part DIY manual and part minor – and sometimes malodorous – comic masterpiece. Amid endless Rabelaisian jests about privies, it ...”

“... died in 1794, in the fancy Calcutta suburb of Garden Reach. Two decades earlier he had drawn up a more fine-grained scale of his own, which he called the ‘Andrometer’. This had 63 points, starting with the Lockean blankness of a newborn child (‘Ideas received through the senses’) and ending in septuagenarian piety (‘Preparation for ...”

“... isolated standsof woodlandare connectedlarch and juniperwild service treesmall leaved limeseparate momentsof alertness becomemore plentifulrivers runfreely throughalder and willow*aspen leaves on mosslight sprinkled over mossstripped spruce conesa water vole runsout over lily padslichens hang from light*riparian trees repairdegraded river banksslow ...”

“... give each other a lot of information, in unmodulated voices, each time they speak. Higginbotham is more comfortable with biography, but this has not deterred her publisher from dressing up her new book like a historical novel of the type she doesn’t much like, with a moody wash of colour and a woman with trailing skirts and half a head. Margaret Pole’s ...”

“... into the atmosphere. The eruption of Mount Laki in June 1783 presented Benjamin Franklin with a more serious problem. As Gillen D’Arcy Wood recounts, Franklin was in Paris the following spring, negotiating peace terms with the British. ‘The makeshift US capital in Annapolis, Maryland, was snowbound, preventing assembly of congressional delegates to ...”

“... do you remember since we lay all night in the Windmill in Saint George’s Field? SIR JOHN: No more of that, good Master Shallow, no more of that. SHALLOW: Ha, ’twas a merry night! And is Jane Nightwork alive? SIR JOHN: She lives, Master Shallow. The italicised words, found in the Folio, are not in the Quarto of ...”

“... whether that was his birth name at all. In Delhi, the theologian Abdul-Haqq Dehlavi listed more than four hundred names for him. ‘I am only the son of a woman from the Quraysh,’ the prophet is reported to have said, ‘who used to eat dried meat.’ In the Vita Mahumeti, from around 1100, Embrico of Mainz recounted the life of Mammutius, a magician ...”

“... on Elizabeth’s life. Young Bess had Jean Simmons in the lead. Hemmed in by Stewart Granger as Thomas Seymour and Charles Laughton reprising his prewar role as Henry VIII, there isn’t much Simmons can do beyond tossing her hair and striking a curious hands-on-hips Holbeinesque pose to suggest that there is more to her ...”

“... he was being lionised elsewhere in Europe by the new Protestant champions of Greek philology. Sir Thomas More and Erasmus (also honoured with an appearance in the Index) were both keen translators and literary imitators of Lucian. His supporters saw him as a clear-thinking and free-speaking opponent of flummery, as well as a brilliant stylist and ...”

“... might prefer to collaborate rather than compete as their sense of being under siege grows more desperate is swept aside by the dogma that everything is automatically improved by the Midas touch of competition. It’s true that students have always competed for places and degrees, universities for the ‘best’ students, researchers for funding and so ...”

“... that his publishers did not find someone to help him to produce an edition which would have been more useful to its readers. One day, the work will have to be done all over again. It makes an ironic contrast with E.S. de Beer’s six-volume edition of Evelyn’s Diary (1955), one of the most meticulous pieces of literary scholarship ever produced. Yet, for ...”

“... of labour was the key to the prosperity of advanced economies. It made the production of goods far more efficient, allowing the creation of cheap commodities that could be enjoyed by everyone. ‘The woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of ...”

“... to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less everywhere.’ Most of us would say the same.But how do we deal with this omnium gatherum when we have got it? We can’t keep it all in our heads. Macaulay claimed that his memory was good enough to enable him to write out the whole of Paradise ...”

“... unpleasant body odours than their descendants do now. If so, this was bad luck, for they were much more likely to encounter them than we are in our deodorised world.In the tenth century the Welsh ruler Hywel Dda allowed wives a marital separation if their husbands had stinking breath. In later centuries, books on courtesy warned readers against inflicting ...”