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“... Stevenson’s adolescent rebellion against his father. Unlike Pope-Hennessy, he does not highlight Thomas Stevenson’s agonised declaration on being told his son was an agnostic: ‘You have rendered my whole life a failure.’ When he discovered that his son was actually preaching atheism to other young men, Thomas went ...”

“... said, ‘that when we had hardly been a year wearing broadcloth at court in mourning for King Henry II, silks had already sunk so low in everyone’s opinion that if you saw anyone dressed in them you immediately set them down as a bourgeois.’ Though the copywriters would like to have us believe that one instinctively knows when something is right, in ...”

“... In​ 1841 Thomas Carlyle declared that ‘the History of the world is but the Biography of great men.’ Soon after, Thomas Babington Macaulay, a policymaker in British India as well as a historian, wrote that ‘a people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants ...”

“... in childbirth; his handwriting was shaky and he blotted his signature. When in the 1590s the poet Henry Lok, anxiously seeking patronage, dedicated sonnets to the great men of the age, he wrote of Robert Cecil’s ‘painefull daies, your many watchfull nights’. He wasn’t exaggerating. Stephen Alford’s All His Spies is an account of a man at the heart ...”

“... that anticipated some of the most distinctive policies of the early Tudors; like Richard, Henry VII proved ‘much set to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure’. Yet for all its ingenuity, Richard’s quest for a new consensus proved fatal to himself and, for nearly a century, to the policies with which he had been associated. The King’s ...”

“... to turn against a view of Shakespeare as a poet who transcends his age.’ In 1599, Shapiro reads Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet as texts written solely to ‘show … the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’. He cites this remark of Prince Hamlet’s as evidence that ‘Shakespeare certainly thought of his art in this ...”

“... of the so-called Reformation Parliament, national business, derived from London interests. Sir Thomas More’s repressive reaction to the early Protestant movement was focused on London, as was Queen Anne Boleyn’s promotion of it. The fall of the reforming statesman Thomas Cromwell happened in London, with immediate ...”

“... the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure. The tourist class was invented by Thomas Cook when he assembled an excursion to the Paris Exposition in 1855. Tourists change their places in groups, live as comfortably as possible, take pleasure in gregariousness, obey injunctions, keep to the main roads, and fulfil plans made by tour-promoters ...”

“... the Protestant Doctrine, was called in question by the Law of the Six Articles, made by King Henry the Eighth against the Protestants, fled his Countrey, and with-drew himself into Kent. After the death of King Henry he got a place among the sea-men in the King’s Navy, to reade Prayers to them: and soon after he was ...”

“... when messengers from the king interrupted them. ‘The monastery of Evesham was suppressed by King Henry VIII … at evensong time,’ John of Alcester recorded, ‘the convent being in the choir at this verse Deposuit potentes, and would not suffer them to make an end.’ Four years into the dissolution, there were few wealthy abbeys left to seize; the very ...”

“... of a strength than a weakness. It absolved her from ever being wrong.’ She was born Georgina Thomas, in the year of Queen Victoria’s succession, to parents who were howling snobs. Morgan Thomas, her father, who had failed to win Coventry for the Tories, made no secret that he intended to match her with a suitor worth ...”

“... likely to come when least expected. Unforgettable, in Volume One, is his message of condolence to Henry Rider Haggard on the death of his ten-year-old son: ‘to be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.’ Such a view does not prevent the joke he makes in congratulating another ...”

“... not blackshirts. But Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth had something to fear from their masses. When Thomas Mann condemns ‘the vulgarity of Hitler’ and laments, in his diaries, the ‘wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild and stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical heroes’, is this an example of literary pride and prejudice ...”

“... told us that his Aretina (1660) was the first novel by a Scotsman (and he mght have mentioned Sir Thomas Urquhart). It is misleading to describe Viscount Dundee as a ‘romantic Jacobite’. He was as committed a Protestant as those he fought against, leading an army that was Protestant only in part. Convictions were everywhere and romanticism an unheard-of ...”

“... The absurdity of the Gothick was captured and its pretensions crisply punctured by Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock, but reality was often stranger than anything that even the most fetid literary imagination could come up with. Nothing could have been odder, more menacing or even more prophetic – when viewed with hindsight – than the Broken Column built ...”