“... for the first time, on 29 August 1835, and went to 45 George Street in Southwark, where a lodger, William Bonell, aged 65, let them into his room and left them to it. Shortly afterwards, they were seen in a compromising position by John and Jane Berkshire, the owners of the house. They were surprised while still in the act, a policeman was called and the two ...”

“... but he had none of the poise and magnificence that were supposed to go with a royal pedigree. William, Prince of Orange was a mousy, middle-aged sociophobe, famous for combining blatant adultery and sanctimonious piety, and loved by no one except, maybe, his docile wife, Mary. But he was a skilful practitioner of the political arts, and over a period of ...”

“... a rich widow and built Oxnead Hall, ten miles north of Norwich. Clement’s great-great-nephew, William, inherited it in 1632. ‘The Paston Treasure’ (c.1663) Six years later William set out on a Grand Tour that would take in the German states, Italy, Athens, Constantinople and Cairo. He built up a magnificent ...”

“... indicate his lineage. This is the painting which has become known as the Sanders portrait, after Thomas Sanders, the man who in 1908 took it to Marion Henry Spielmann, author of the pioneering Portraits of Shakespeare (1907), claiming that a hitherto undocumented family tradition identified it as a likeness of ...”

“... Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a substance full of Eastern promise, but also one which, having been invited to the banquet of the ...”

“... and ruled capital punishment itself to be ‘cruel and unusual’. In Furman’s case only William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the Court’s one black member, voted to strike down nearly all existing capital statutes on the grounds that they were intrinsically in violation of human rights or communal dignity. As Marshall put it in another ...”

“... and his wife of ten years, Mary Anne Hanson. She had for some time been having an affair with William Rowland Alder, a lawyer. The pair abused and mocked Lord Portsmouth, both physically and mentally, even making him a spectator to their fornication. These details came to light through a legal instrument known as a ‘commission in lunacy’, whose roots ...”

“... the manhunt undertaken by Charles II’s restored government for two men, Edward Whalley and William Goffe. Their names appeared, alongside Ludlow’s, on Charles I’s death warrant in 1649. Whalley was a first cousin of Oliver Cromwell and his was the fourth signature on the warrant. Goffe, his son-in-law, was the fourteenth signatory; Ludlow was the ...”

“... lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’ had entered the English language from law French, and were usually glossed as meaning ‘design’ or ‘intend’. The ...”

“... answer that it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had ...”

“... and eventually he fled to exile in America. Davy’s previous employer, the chemist and physician Thomas Beddoes, had also been confined to the margins of his profession because of his support for the French Revolution. Davy’s address to the Royal Institution relaunched science for the new century with an assurance to the English hierarchy that, under his ...”

“... of cheek, John Horne had achieved a success that was to be of great moment for his future life. William Tooke, a Norfolk landowner who had been founder treasurer of the Bill of Rights Society, was being out-manoeuvred in a property dispute with a neighbour, Sir Thomas de Grey, who sought to arrange the passage of the ...”

“... in intelligence,’ he says magnificently. ‘I’m after the truth.’ The colonel has a nephew, William ‘Skip’ Sands, who also works for the CIA, and who is also based in the Philippines. His uncle sends him on a mission up country, ‘his first official operation as an intelligence officer’, to investigate a suspect American priest called Father ...”

“... British records are as follows: 1. 1785, month unknown. Shot near Wingham in Kent, at the seat of William Hammond, Esq.; sent to the ornithologist Dr John Latham, author of A General Synopsis of Birds (1781-1801). 2. 1793, month unknown. Shot in North Wales by George Kingston of Queen’s College, Oxford; became part of the collection of the botanist Dr John ...”

“... In his lifetime his reputation was high, but Sir Thomas Lawrence was scarcely buried – with great pomp in the crypt of St Paul’s – before the feeling spread that his work had more brilliance than substance. Victorians, who disliked the morals and manners of the leaders of Regency society, found them reflected in Lawrence’s frequently showy pictures of the men, their wives, their mistresses and their children – legitimate and otherwise ...”