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“... is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s ...”

“... it is so much cut-and-paste soup. In the final article in this section the political scientist James Miller asks ‘Is Bad Writing Necessary?’ This is essentially a comparison of Orwell and Adorno as models of criticism, and you can guess who wins. But in fact no one does: the opposition serves neither, since the intellectual difficulty of Adorno is ...”

“... the most dubious morality. Building on the classic image of Walsingham as spymaster established by James Anthony Froude’s History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for ...”

“... and potential employer, Cosimo de’ Medici. The same day, the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, sent a copy to James I, describing it as ‘the strangest piece of news (as I may justly call it)’ that he would ever have received ‘from any part of the world’. Most copies were probably sent over the Alps ...”

“... and intellectually arrogant. He was related on his mother’s side to the Wadsworths (as in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); his father, from a more colourful background, was a government employee at the Mint. Philadelphia was a financial centre, with thriving exchanges and a bourse; it had not produced great writers. It was only after meeting William ...”

“... himself locked up in the forbidding United States Jail in Washington DC, in the cell that had held James Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau. He not only escaped from it, but also, on the way out, opened the cells of two other inmates and made them switch places. Legend has it that he asked the occupant of one of the cells what he’d done to get locked ...”

“... before it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ‘novelists’ novelist’. He did not necessarily mean it as a compliment: Flaubert’s cultivation of craft, James thought, went hand in hand with a thinning of the human ...”

“... the impossibility of predicting the behaviour of a turbulent system. Early on, Foden’s narrator, Henry Meadows, quotes a line attributed to Einstein: ‘Before I die, I hope someone will clarify quantum physics for me. After I die, I hope God will explain turbulence to me.’ (With what turns out to be habitual pedantry, Meadows notes that the line has also ...”

“... the copper mines in Mexico’. The richer they became, the less people liked it. Florette recalls Henry Hilton trying to ban ‘the Seligman Jews’ from his fine hotels in 1877. Their descendants know that New York society still associates the rough, uncouth origins of their wealth – ‘the dank dirt of mines, underground, filth’ – with their ...”

“... trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically attributed collection ...”

“... the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred or so of these ...”

“... still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group, assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918 you couldn’t ...”

“... of 1928, a previously unknown painting turns up on the London art market. It belongs to a Major Henry Howard of Surrey. He is 45 years old. His father has just died and left him a large estate, and he’s selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end ...”

“... the way up the Channel, and the bulk of the English fleet was there, though a squadron under Lord Henry Seymour remained in the Downs. The whole fleet, that is to say the Queen’s ships (the Royal Navy), together with merchantmen and coasters hired by the Queen or by different towns or sailing as volunteers, came to 197 vessels carrying 15,925 men, of whom ...”

“... means solely, intellectual and geistig. Among his grandfather’s guests at Redmond Manor he met Henry Raeburn, who painted Sir Francis Marbot (1803, now at the Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope) were frequent guests; on his solitary rides in the Lakes ...”