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“... interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were thrown about, children ...”

“... The bogus Martin Guerre was an obscure figure until Davis – together with the film director Daniel Vigne and the actor Gérard Depardieu – made him famous. Her reconstruction of the story of the impersonation and its acceptance by the woman owed almost as much to speculation as it did to written evidence. Trickster Travels is another micro-history ...”

“... of Chartist history with miniature profiles of forgotten Chartist heroes – among them Daniel McN’aghten of McN’aghten Rules fame who was consigned to Bedlam with the clinical diagnosis: ‘Imagines the Tories are his enemies.’ A whole chapter is devoted to ‘hen Chartists’ and particularly their involvement in the anti-Poor Law campaign ...”

“... was impressive, especially in the case of the ‘Dream Team’ of Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl. On the other hand, to be in the running one had to be a designated über-architect, presumably with the technical expertise required of grands projets: stock in the Dream Team, Lord Foster and the Skidmore Owings & Merrill group ...”

“... could not endure that he should go,’ Mary wrote. He went all the same, with Edward Williams, Daniel Roberts (the naval captain who had overseen the building of the boat) and the ‘boat boy’, Charles Vivian. They made good time: ‘a run of 45 to 50 miles in seven hours and a half’, Williams noted in his journal. A ...”

“... obeyed by his corporate and intelligence allies, to ‘make the Chilean economy scream.’ (As Daniel Ellsberg’s wife commented when she first saw the Pentagon papers, the American authorities in those days were fond of using ‘the language of torturers’.) So that when the Chilean Armed Forces came out of their barracks in September 1973, and began ...”

“... buried in Glasnevin Cemetery beside others who had fought and suffered for the cause of Ireland: Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, Paddy Dignam. Although there is a large collection of Casement documents in the National Library in Dublin (and other items which he brought back from Africa and South America ...”

“... poor Michael Davitt and his Land League only got a look in because they represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when ...”

“... and literature available to Joyce: Ibsen, Shaw, Hauptmann, Freud, Have-lock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, Charles Albert, Otto Weininger, and many other rhetoricians of sex. The lore is informative, though it is bound to excite the reader into thinking that Joyce was permanently retarded in the matter of sexuality. Brown has a phrase or two from Finnegans Wake to ...”

“... the door, the Memorial argued, to Puritan fanaticism and the levelling politics that came with it. Daniel Defoe, an able provocateur in his own right, thought the Memorial ‘Mutinous Bluster’, ‘a Malicious Seditious Book’, an ‘Invidious Trumpet of Rebellion’. Writing from the battlefields of Belgium during the War of the Spanish Succession, the Duke ...”

“... to bodily inhibition took place quite slowly, however: Anthony Wood complained that when Charles II’s courtiers left Oxford, they also left ‘their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars’. True civility was the property of the city. ‘Since classical times,’ Thomas writes, ‘“rusticity” (rusticitas) and ...”

“... devices for the vertical transport of goods, primarily, but also of people. The English diplomat Charles Greville, writing in 1830, recalled with admiration a lift in the Genoese palace of the Sardinian royal couple: ‘For the comfort of their bodies he has a machine made like a car, which is drawn up by a chain from the bottom to the top of the house; it ...”

“... It was the 19th-century Irish statesman Daniel O’Connell who first turned politics into mass entertainment. His so-called Monster Meetings were carnivals as much as demonstrations, and mark the beginning of mass politics in the modern age. When he wasn’t haranguing thousands of small farmers about Catholic emancipation or the repeal of the Union, O’Connell practised as a barrister, the most theatrical of the professions ...”

“... he replied that if the man would only stay while he charged his piece, he would shoot him too. Charles Harper, in his Half-Hours with the Highwaymen (1908), wrote, as Sharpe wryly records: ‘It would be a thankless task to present the highwayman as he really was: a fellow rarely heroic, generally foul-mouthed and cruel, and often cowardly … I do not ...”

“... look the same.’ Odd then that in printed books it’s possible to distinguish Henry James from Charles Dickens. Nonetheless, most authors have ignored the warnings, bought electronic typewriters and taught themselves to type, and so have those in the world of commerce, with the result that the vast increase of women taking over the clerical work of men ...”