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“... Newton used to turn down the corners of the pages of his books so that they pointed to the exact passage he wished to recall. J.H. Plumb once showed me a set of Swift’s works given him by G.M. Trevelyan; it had originally belonged to Macaulay, who had drawn a line all the way down the margin of every page as he read it, no doubt committing the whole to ...”

“... stand out which reveals the hand that wrote it. He may see – as suddenly as, at a turn of the passage, one comes upon one’s image in a mirror – a living face.This essay was published in its final form in 1984, four years before her death, but it began as a lecture she gave at Cambridge in 1958, and this particular ...”

“... about sex but about the people to whom the genital organs are attached. By contrast, there is a passage from Wendy Perriam’s The Fifty-Minute Hour which offers as little incentive to lubricity as any of the 18th-century descriptions of chancres and nodules. Perhaps it is not Perriam’s fault but Pitt-Kethley’s, for taking the ...”

“... now about every character in the Book.’ A few years later, awaiting the final volume of Sir Charles Grandison, she told him that if there wasn’t a happy ending, ‘why I shall have a fine flameing Bone-fire, that’s all. except that I shall wish you in the midst of it.’ Richardson enjoyed her fits of pique, especially when they were aimed at other ...”

“... hundred and sixty years ago in the dreadful frost and snow at the beginning of 1814, kind-hearted Charles Lamb was out in all weathers, visiting the imprisoned Leigh Hunt who had been put away for two years for ridiculing the Prince Regent. Hyde Park was then littered with dirty people and provisions (not that much has changed in the interval), Mary Lamb had ...”

“... England was at peace in 1626, when it was at war with both France and Spain. The picture of Charles behaving with a gravity that spoiled the conversation at Henrietta Maria’s private supper parties, brings the couple alive. The proclamation enjoining men to keep their urine for a year for the making of saltpetre captures the impracticality which was ...”

“... the most extraordinary incidents in 17th-century English history. On 17 February 1623, the future Charles I and the royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, set off for Madrid incognito. They wore false beards, and they called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta María. The ...”

“... in the year prior to Restoration, some of them also greeted with bonfires and bells. Charles II’s great challenge was to turn momentary sentiment into permanence, and he approached his task with great circumspection. He left every controversial decision unresolved until after a new parliament had set to work, and attempted to balance competing ...”

“... It is strange,’ Charles Tomlinson writes, ‘to have met the innovators of one’s time only when age had overtaken them.’ The innovators to whom he refers are those American poets – Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and others – whose work and moral example have been of importance to his own growth as a writer ...”

“... go on counting ... They might still be in the minority and yet they sprang up everywhere.’ This passage, with its untroubled description of lesbianism, is unusual in Hall’s fiction – although it is true that even these confident young women exist only to point up Joan’s own failure in this respect and others. The portrayal of homosexual life in ...”

“... by Lawrence Lipking in his important book, The Ordering of the Arts in 18th-Century England – Charles Burney’s History of Music, for example, Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art and Johnson’s own Lives of the Poets. The Oxford History of English Literature hasn’t ‘superceded’ Johnson’s Lives, and there’s a sense in which we must say that ...”

“... In the great quilted cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties ...”

“... as the Scots quickly realised, was one of the things of which union had deprived them: when Charles I went to war with Spain, in 1625, there appears to be almost no evidence that Scotland was so much as informed, let alone consulted. Some time shortly after this date, Secretary Coke, taking a leaf out of Olivares’s book, drew up a plan for a union of ...”

“... convinced that item # 322 in Moore’s Checklist is spurious: that is, A History of the Wars of Charles XII. Their declared grounds are twofold: first, its totally unprofessional manner (‘everything in it bespeaks the amateur writer’); and second, its lack of general ideas (‘so intellectually vacant a chronicle’). Both views are critically ...”

“... beyond the edges of the old maps. Glyn Williams’s Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage is an engrossing account of four centuries of exploration, as expedition after expedition tried to negotiate a course through the vast, multitudinous, close-set and ice-locked archipelago to the north of the American continent. The ice is now ...”