“... his translations smuggled into England. He had an in-and-out relationship with the government of Henry VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by Thomas Cromwell to have him sent to ...”

“... sustained an internal injury occasioned by a strain while batting. In the melancholy death of James Creighton there is a warning to others.’ The American public exploded at the news, and one of the consequences was that baseball became firmly established as America’s national pastime in the years leading up to the Civil War. Then, during lulls on the ...”

“... the fiction, or William of Orange in real life (or Sidney himself if it had ever come to that, or James I’s son Prince Henry, whom Sidney never knew), needed no limitation except its own inherent virtue. It is anachronistic to say so, but Sidney’s politics tended to the right as much as to the left. What does ‘know ...”

“... of 1857 had underlined. As Meyer and Brysac indicate, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, directed by Henry Hathaway and released in 1935, was Hitler’s favourite film. (Mussolini’s Motion Picture Bureau banned it, deeming it to be pro-British propaganda.) Major Francis Yeats-Brown’s book, whose title the film borrowed, was a memoir of life as an officer in ...”

“... market town between Kingston and Spanish Town. This was where Clare and Stuart’s grandfather Henry, the local pharmacist, lived with his wife, Mamee (her first name was never used), along with their five daughters and two sons, in a small house on South Street. It was a lower-middle-class Brown household. The oldest daughter, Gerry, was an impressive ...”

“... Bay Company, established in 1670 to exploit the potential of the North American fur trade. Henry Hudson had discovered the vast body of water in Canada’s northeast that bears his name 60 years earlier, in the summer of 1610. (The previous year, exploring further south, he had sailed from New York Bay up what we now call the Hudson River to where ...”

“... discusses are Hever Castle in Kent, the home of Anne Boleyn, which was done up by the Astors, and Henry VIII’s Eltham Palace, which acquired a dazzling if slightly incongruous extension in the Moderne style for the Courtaulds. Estate agents were not slow to take note of the historical wow factor and Tinniswood notes that extensive as Elizabeth I’s ...”

“... the New Republic, as chairman of the American Veterans’ Committee and as a liberal supporter of Henry Wallace, Michael Straight became for a time a quite vigorous and effective opponent of the Communist Party of the United States in the years before the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy got into their stride. He was lucky to escape their ...”

“... nature was also the careerist who desperately sought public office, working his way up to become James I’s lord chancellor, only to be brought down by his political opponents on a charge of corruption. It used to be said that there was no connection between Bacon’s intellectual life and his public career. Macaulay set the pattern for this interpretation ...”

“... Blake died a decade before Victoria came to the throne. I am bound therefore to think that James Turner (who ‘teaches history’, the back flap says, ‘at the University of Massachusetts, Boston’) is mistaken in his central thesis that the Victorians witnessed ‘the emergence of a new, distinctively modern sensibility’ about animals. His ...”

“... followed by Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court in the 1860s and 1870s). Students such as James Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone, who graduated from Edinburgh University in 1859, exhibited both pro-British and pro-African sympathies. Horton ‘welcomed British civilisation and Christianity’, Adi writes, ‘especially for what were considered to be ...”

“... Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx himself’). Engels disliked him intensely, and it ...”

“... another of Halperin’s ‘great’ novels, appeared in the same year as What Maisie Knew. James, indeed, is more judicious than this later eulogist of Gissing. He had, he said, a ‘persistent taste’ for this author, a taste established by New Grub Street and triumphing ‘even over the fact that he almost as persistently disappoints me ... The ...”

“... shelf, or cupboard-top, of books: Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, Junkie, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Lolita, books which I had lovingly collected from jumble sales and Oxfam shops, and which I now had a strong sense were somehow ‘wrong’. We’d done ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ for O-level English, so that stayed. Nineteen Eighty-Four was ...”

“... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John ...”