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“... clearly as a group, or so hilariously as a palsied social tribe. There’s the horrible bookseller Edmund Curll, Pope’s enemy of twenty years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of ...”

“... merely manifestations of an old man’s retrospective disillusion. In 1887 he began a letter to Edmund Gosse, ‘I shall be very pleased indeed to hand on the subscription to the Barnes memorial’; continued a few lines later, ‘As to despondency I have known the very depths of it – you would be quite shocked if I were to tell you how many weeks ...”

“... the earliest scientific soundbites. ‘But for him, in all human probability’, wrote Augustus de Morgan in the mid-19th century, the Principia ‘would not have been thought of, nor when thought of written, nor when written printed’. Halley ‘almost made’ Newton write the book. Halley was alter ego to the wholly other. He understood both the ...”

“... he was taking part. His critics were more confident; they set him in the company of Middleton, Morgan, Tindal and Bolingbroke – Hume and Voltaire are also prominent, but the assault on Gibbon as an ‘English Voltaire’ responsible for the French Revolution necessarily belongs to the 1790s more than the 1770s – and to this mainly English coterie they ...”