“... and privilege. The genealogy of CUP – though not its history – stretches back to 1534, when Henry VIII allowed the University, by royal charter, to appoint three printers who could work in Cambridge. The University was to approve the printers’ choice of books, which could be sold both in Cambridge and elsewhere. Permission to do this, granted at the ...”

“... met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part of the town’, and found him making models and playing with his two adopted ...”

“... and could thump the floor with it. Jacobson cites Tony Hancock (together with Arthur Askey and James Thurber) as his principal literary influence, and one detects the glum eloquence of Anthony Aloysius in passages like the above. It’s probably not coincidental that it was Australia which brought the other comedian to his final suicidal extremity. In ...”

“... caused an outburst of public indignation in Britain. When it emerged that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had authorised the opening of Mazzini’s correspondence, he was attacked in Parliament for resorting to ‘the spy system of foreign states’ and Carlyle wrote to the Times that opening of men’s letters was ‘a practice near of kin to picking ...”

“... at least in this capacity. I mean, of course, Thomas Jefferson. On 9 May 1825, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee about the Declaration that ‘neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind and to give that expression the proper tone and ...”

“... and no more. There is no doubt that ceremonial squabbles were widespread under Elizabeth I and James I: nonconformist ministers hit trouble with their parishioners, and parents went off to neighbouring churches to ensure their babies were crossed. The evidence for clashes in the 1630s is less convincing. ‘High ceremonialists’, such as Cosin, Montague ...”

“... He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your ...”

“... revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude naturalism’), and William James (‘an impassioned empiricism ... declaring the universe to be wild and young’). The Californian ‘humorists’ referred to by Santayana were the product, primarily, of a distinct historical phenomenon – the mining towns which sprang up during and ...”

“... consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay and flogged a couple of seniors for staying out late, Mackay told his father, the Earl of Inchcape. Rough treatment of the appropriately-named Viscount Brocas caused dismay in the household of his father, Earl Jellicoe. I recall the outraged ...”

“... of the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to ...”

“... of workers about the dangers of creeping socialism. Like Friedrich Hayek, Ludvig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, whose work he deeply admired, Reagan even in the 1950s saw the New Deal welfare state as profoundly dangerous. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society – with its health insurance for the old and the poor, its food stamps and easier access ...”

“... origins in their titles: ‘Sestina on Six Words by Weldon Kees’, ‘Variations on a Theme from James’, ‘After a Phrase Abandoned by Wallace Stevens’, ‘Variations on a Text by Vallejo’, ‘A Variation on Baudelaire’s “La Servante au grand coeur”’. ‘American Scenes (1904-1905)’ is quarried almost entirely from ...”

“... 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 William Shakespeare. Spielmann liked the picture, about which he wrote in the Connoisseur and later in ...”

“... and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a young, growing and prosperous country, where men’s problems have been simpler than in Europe and usually soluble by energy ...”

“... his context. Words weren’t his language; he spoke in action. In one of many piquant anecdotes in James Curtis’s encyclopedic new biography, on hearing the thumps as Keaton repeatedly threw himself against their common office wall at Twentieth Century Fox, the film editor Gene Fowler stuck his head into Keaton’s room. ‘What are you doing?!’ ‘I’m ...”