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“... set reason against feeling and convention against homosexual impulse, but unlike the youthful Hugh Walpole (one of the earliest kittens to fluster Benson with his friskiness) or Eton masters like William Johnson Cory and Oscar Browning, his fear of sex was so great that he could keep his footing in the ‘precarious trade’ of schoolmastering and avoid that ...”

“... On 28 January 1754, Horace Walpole coined a pretty bauble of a word in a letter to Horace Mann, apropos of a happy discovery made while browsing in an old book of Venetian heraldry: Mann had just sent him the Vasari portrait of the Grand Duchess Bianca Capello, and Walpole stumbled on the Capello coat of arms ...”

“... figures who went on to play a leading role in the French Revolution, including Marat and Brissot. Horace Walpole, the Whig politician and man of letters, lauded her as ‘the female Thucydides’, though when she attacked his late father, the former prime minister Robert Walpole, he backtracked, deciding she was a ...”

“... Swift at the Juvenalian pole of what Mr Grigson calls ‘those ancestral antipodes in satire, Horace and Juvenal’. There is little that is identifiably Juvenalian in Swift, though the myth to the contrary dies hard. Swift’s temperamental dislike of ‘lofty stiles’ was too well-developed to tempt him often into the majesties of ‘tragical ...”

“... and his cynicism matched her disillusion. Another worldling became even more important to her. Horace Walpole evidently grew concerned at the interpretations which society might put on this much older woman’s amitié amoureuse for him, and directed that she eventually destroy his letters. But hers to him remain, betraying something of the ...”

“... and Liberty’ was a powerful, unifying totem, but Wilkes the man set Radical against Radical. Horace Walpole presciently thought that by temperament he was a man who might be ‘dulled into prudence’. When he became an exemplary City magistrate, defending the Bank of England against the Gordon Rioters, there was little comment. When he became a ...”

“... Finch and Jonathan Swift. His sumptuous editions of classical poets in Latin or English (Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Virgil) cast reflected glory on his vernacular list. When an ambitious Oxford graduate called Basil Kennett told Tonson in 1696 that he felt ‘a higher respect than ever for Poetry and You’, it was as though poetry were now ...”

“... It not only created fiery anguish in the big toe but caused a white precipitation at the knuckles. Horace Walpole wrote of ‘chalky rills running from the fingers’ and ‘a hail of chalkstones and liquid chalk’, as if from a burst pipe. The authors have spotted in a Sherlock Holmes story an old man ‘cram full of gout’ of whom it was said that he ...”

“... and valued friend of Voltaire, in England ‘a blind old woman is only a pitiable object’ and ‘Horace Walpole was in a ludicrous state of terror lest her letters should be seen, for he fancied people might think she was in love with him, forsooth.’In 1827 Mary Mohl was projecting ‘a history of women’, and was searching out material on ‘the ...”

“... a mile from my own house after sunset without one or two servants with blunderbusses,’ wrote Horace Walpole in 1782. A footpad or a highwayman might be round any turn in the road. Highwaymen were proud to carry pistols because the pistol, like the sword, was a mark of status, but the pistols they carried were close-quarter weapons, to be thrust in ...”

“... of Commons, Horne astonished MPs by his respectful behaviour and respectable attire. According to Horace Walpole, he was ‘pale, but well made, and had a sensible countenance. He was neatly and decently dressed in grey. He spoke with affected respect, much deliberation and firmness.’ He was acquitted of contempt since there was no proof of his ...”

“... the Soviet public – though not equally well, of course. The Soviet period has seen editions of Horace Walpole, Ludwig Tieck, the brothers Brentano, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Charles Maturin, Jacques Casot, Novalis and others in a revised Russian translation. Although the editions were limited and the books were to become bibliographical rarities almost as soon ...”

“... prospects of high art might be in any way connected with the priorities of evangelism. This was Horace Walpole, who whimsically hoped that the Methodists might ‘adopt the artifices of the Catholics’and ‘borrow the paraphernalia of enthusiasm now waning in Italy’. He was not thinking of waxwork horrors and saccharine sacré coeurs but of Raphael ...”

“... he sat, the Lord Chief Justice, spectacles broken, ‘quivering like an aspen’ according to Horace Walpole, while his fellow peers, who had been torn from their chariots and chased over roofs, arrived ‘dis-wigged’ and debris-spattered; one had been relieved of his watch and a bishop had had his lawn sleeves ripped off. There, too, I would have ...”

“... to be greeted by a peal on the abbey bells and qualified for a passing bell if things went ill. Horace Walpole said: ‘The English are like ducks; they are for ever waddling to the waters.’ That was in 1790. The English were about to undergo a collective change in behaviour: the waters to which they would increasingly waddle were the coastal ...”