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“... financial pressures and a hail of deadlines. The looming Frankfurt Book Fair caused such stress in Thomas Platter’s printing house in 1536 that Platter’s partner Balthasar Ruch attacked him with a ‘heavy pine board’ while Platter was correcting proofs. We sense this mix of industry and panic, of erudition and hard graft, in a Moses Thym engraving from ...”

“... 15 October. Shot in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire; became part of the collection of the Rev. Thomas Gisborne of Staffordshire, known for his 1797 book, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. Exhibited, along with a Baillon’s crake, at a meeting of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastlein 1828; drawn by the engraver ...”

“... his impeccable ecological credentials, which anticipate those of another wilderness-loving loner, Henry David Thoreau, Natty is also, as the book’s final words put it, ‘the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent’. More than three thousand copies of The Pioneers were purchased within ...”

“... the House of Representatives, the precedent evoked is that of 1800, ‘when Colonel Burr and Thomas Jefferson each received the same number of votes’. The most interesting historical figure in 1876 is Tilden, whose principled refusal to cheat the process (or work it) is viewed by Schuyler with equal measures of respect and impatience. Tilden is one of ...”

“... bones. The Dark Frontier started out as a parody of the stories Ambler had such scorn for. Henry Barstow is a mild-mannered, overworked physicist who lives in Wimbledon. While on holiday in the West Country, he has a car accident from which he emerges convinced he is Conway Carruthers, the lantern-jawed hero of a sixth-rate thriller he had glanced ...”

“... and hear the early orchestral recordings, with their patchy intonation. Elgar, Adrian Boult, Henry Wood, Thomas Beecham: the gentleman-conductors held sway, stiff and upholstered on the podium, their white moustaches like frozen waterfalls, their batons cocked like riding crops. Elgar famously told the teenaged Yehudi ...”

“... it should have some ‘chastening influence … on the self-confidence of mankind’, and Henry Adams likened the news to the foundering of the Republican Party: ‘the sum and triumph of civilisation … our greatest achievement sinks at a touch … Nature jeers at us for our folly.’ The sinking of the Titanic very quickly seemed freighted with ...”

“... far from what would in Britain be called ‘Victorian’. Not surprising, perhaps, given how much Thomas Carlyle took from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and civic ...”

“... memory that is both affectionate and scornful, runs like an underground current through his work. Henry James and Lenny Bruce are often taken to be Roth’s improbably paired patron saints, but it is possible to add Eleanor Roosevelt to the gallery – or at least Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson, whose names are murmured ...”

“... hopeless case round. Among these, and well recounted by Kadri, is Clarence Darrow’s defence of Henry Sweet, a student whose brother Ossian had in 1925 moved with his family into one of Detroit’s all-white suburbs. The Sweets were black, and local reaction had left them in no doubt that their lives were in danger. The family armed itself against the ...”

“... on to his young half-sister. For the most part, however, she was left to her own devices. Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ was partly based on the unsettled childhood of his friend John Singer Sargent, but he might as well have been describing Violet Paget’s youth. It was Mrs Sargent, encountered when Violet was ten, who became the first of a ...”

“... Modern American writers have taken to heart Thomas Wolfe’s warning that ‘you can’t go home again.’ These days, being American or being modern or both seems to demand recognition of exile. The writer has to say goodbye to his folks at the earliest opportunity. That is only the first stage in his education in the estrangements of our times ...”

“... celestial clockwork. That was in the 17th century. Now medicine has become, in the words of Lewis Thomas, the youngest science; and the kind of wanton incompetence that did for Josef Shklovsky has passed into history, at least in the West. Or has it? In 1983, the Journal of the American Medical Society published the results of a study on 100 deaths, all shown ...”

“... of them, and – although there is still pleasure to be had from quiz questions like ‘what do Henry Pye and Laurence Eusden have in common?’ – the whole thing is now generally agreed to be a joke. Or is it? Sometimes I am not so sure. The other day, for instance, I was contacted by a highly serious poet friend who was, he said, thinking of starting up ...”

“... Pascal, Rossetti and Mérimée, and includes some distinctly obscure pieces, such as an essay on Thomas Browne which is a small-scale masterpiece.The conventional image of Pater as a narrow aesthete or fastidious connoisseur is contradicted by these volumes. What emerges instead is a man of formidable learning and intellectual scope, a polyglot in modern as ...”