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“... it about right. It was pretty motley to be a sort of Jacobite (‘It was a’ for our rightfu’ king’), and also a sort of Jacobin (‘a perjured Blockhead and an unprincipled Prostitute’ was his comment on the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette). Again, mourning Scotland’s loss of independence and praising the British constitution are none ...”

“... and aristocrats, and definitive likenesses of Elizabethan celebrities such as Walter Ralegh and Francis Drake, but many of his portraits are now catalogued under the frustrating title of ‘Unknown Man’ or ‘Woman’. Goldring’s index lists 22, and there are certainly more: their number has grown over the years, as earlier identifications have proved ...”

“... subversive Gemma’s physical eloquence was. The saint first affected by the stigmata was Francis of Assisi, but it has afflicted many more women than men. It insists on the likeness of the believer’s body to that of Christ. It argues that the gender of the redemptive body does not matter. It undermines the notion of a masculine God. It shows that ...”

“... the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No ...”

“... of The Huntsman. According to Gaston Phoebus’s 14th-century Livre de chasse, the hare is ‘king of all venery’. Turner drew and painted several hare chases apart from Rain, Steam and Speed. In one of them, a hare runs over the spot where Harold was felled at the Battle of Hastings. In Apollo and Daphne (c.1837), Daphne prevents Apollo from helping a ...”

“... unassisted genius’; others saw her poetic inventions as nothing more than a talent for mimicry. Francis Williams, a Black Jamaican slave owner, praised her verse in assimilationist terms: ‘Thy body’s white, tho’ clad in sable vest.’ A reader sneered in 1788 that ‘an ourang outang has composed an ode.’ This is why, for Gates, Wheatley was not ...”

“... in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing outsider, master subordinate, male ...”

“... of ‘mania’ in 1788. At the ensuing Parliamentary inquiry into his treatment, it emerged that Francis Willis, the divine-cum-physician who had treated him, had allowed the King to shave himself with a cut-throat razor. As Frederick Reynolds related the story a quarter of a century later, Edmund Burke immediately ...”

“... proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in them cannot be ...”

“... joke) with a medallion of the Queen hanging round his neck and positioned over his heart. Philip Francis told Burke the account was ‘pure foppery’. Jefferson said the real-life queen bore little resemblance to ‘the rhapsodies of Burke’. They might or might not have agreed with recent commentators who see Marie Antoinette’s nakedness, like that of ...”

“... a phase of ‘improving’ the imperfect Shakespeare, as for example in Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear, which allowed Cordelia not only to survive but to marry Edgar – a much more ‘satisfying’ result. And the 19th century produced one of my favourite ‘prequels’, Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which offered the ...”

“... conversing on the subject of ‘murder will out’, and one of them tells a story about a woman of King’s Lynn who confessed to having killed her husband when she saw a play about a similar crime:Sitting to behold a tragedy …Acted by players travelling that way,Wherein a woman that had murtherd hersWas ever haunted with her husband’s ghost …She was so ...”

“... high or middle-grade erotic printmakers, builders of grottos, providers of poesie to the king of Spain. These various sites and types of image-making amount to a circuitry, in Bull’s opinion, not a set of high-and-low sealed chambers. ‘Somewhere along the route from porn to poesie,’ he says in a not uncharacteristic sentence, ‘the loves of ...”

“... drove big trucks and longed to wander the West at terrifying speed on a motorcycle, and a third (Francis) was ‘a musing, discontented, lonely young reader of books … filled with a strange pleasure and the belief that he is the only mortal in the town who has frighteningly understood the meaning of life and death’. When Kerouac’s friend the poet Allen ...”

“... duty-free privilege, but the English intervened. An official letter warned the Hamburg Senate that King William would regard any agreements with the Company of Scotland as an ‘affront’. Paterson and his delegation returned almost empty-handed. Meanwhile, the directors had managed to slow the cash haemorrhage just before the company went broke. The first ...”