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“... it is impossible for us now to re-create the alarming or exhilarating effect of a few pages of Daniel Defoe on an 18th-century reader reared on a literary diet of epic, pastoral and elegy. The idea that everyday life is dramatically enthralling, that it is fascinating simply in its boundless humdrum detail, is one of the great revolutionary ...”

“... she is also a literary adventurer in the mode of Moll’s author, the Grub Street entrepreneur Daniel Defoe. After her heyday at White’s she had begun ‘a blank-verse tragedy, The Roman Father, based on an episode in Roman history in which the heroine, Virginia, her honour threatened by the advances of a corrupt tyrant, is killed by her ...”

“... cleanliest Way of bribing a Nation, to undo themselves; and alas! It had the design’d Effect.’ Daniel Defoe, working in Edinburgh as an English spy, noticed how easily the Equivalent anaesthetised patriot consciences: ‘Nor among the most Malecontent persons could I ever find any, that when the Money upon the . . . Stock came to be paid, would ...”

“... Lido mania, and the rampancy of the wild swimming clubs were to lead to a baby boom. In 1724 Daniel Defoe noted that in Bath, where there was mixed bathing, quivering and shivering love-making would regularly round off the day’s exercise at the ‘Cross-Bath’ before the sedan-chairs were summoned. The hydrotherapy in Malvern cured both Florence ...”

“... Guiana instead.The best examples of such tenacious brazenness come from the Restoration, which Daniel Defoe described as a ‘projecting age’. Stern’s bravura account of the Sword Blades Company reveals its ingenious methods of creative accounting. After William III had routed James II in Ireland, the Crown sold off confiscated rebel estates to ...”

“... John Cannon, an 18th-century diarist, recalled his grandfather keeping his accounts with beans. Daniel Defoe claimed to know a shopkeeper who ‘knew nothing of figures, but he kept six spoons in a place on purpose, near his counter, which he took out when he had occasion to cast up any sum’.Jessica Otis’s By the Numbers surveys what she calls the ...”

“... children were dressed up like little adults as soon as they could walk, and set to work. To Daniel Defoe, on his tour of the country in 1727, this was a sign that all was well in Britain. ‘If we knock’d at the door of any of the master manufacturers, we presently saw a house full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-vat, some dressing the ...”

“... I should also like to know how he came to write so well in the straightforward narrative style of Daniel Defoe. But on all these matters we are left to guess: we learn the facts about his life and nothing about his motivation. Like other school-leavers, he had no rational basis for choosing one university rather than another and his retrospective ...”

“... to us today – Knightsbridge, Regent’s Park and so on – mostly date from this period. Daniel Defoe had noted long before that London had more prisons than any other city in Europe. Now further bastilles were added. London also had the highest rate of executions in Europe, although this dropped markedly with the opening of the Australian penal ...”

“... and theology. Two separate chapters are concerned with the operations of that wily English rogue Daniel Defoe, and John Pocock delivers a thoughtful contribution on the relationship of the Union to the American Revolution. But the book’s two key items are Robertson’s own articles, particularly the second, ‘An Elusive Sovereignty’, in which he ...”

“... the Derry of William Philips. Its historical scope is just as broad. After a final chapter on Daniel Defoe’s activities in Edinburgh in 1706-7, where he intrigued, lobbied and proselytised on behalf of the Union, Kerrigan adds a substantial epilogue exploring the interconnected histories of Britishness, Irishness, Welshness, Scottishness and ...”

“... as we would be to find ourselves alone at night on the dangerous streets of the London of Defoe and Richardson, or the Atlanta and New York of today. What brought safety to the streets of the English city? It is worth pausing over this question, because we tend to assume that urbanisation and commercial growth, combined with poverty and ...”

“... her particular objective, ‘the military metaphor’; on the way, she finds support in Nietzsche, Defoe and Alessandro Manzoni. Other writers expand the damaging mythologies of plague: Thomas Mann’s works, she observes, form ‘a storehouse of early 20th-century disease myths’. She writes against the discourse of retribution, noting that the Emperor ...”

“... of a teenage girl. Around this time, ancient terrors begin to be reborn as mass entertainment – Defoe wrote a popular veridical tale, The Apparition of Mrs Veal, about a Mrs Bargrave in Canterbury who meets her dead friend Mrs Veal. The Gothic novel, launched by Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, initiated a new tradition of supernatural fiction, and ...”

“... black mare Bess bestrode.’ But the origins of Turpin’s ride lie much further back, in Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, in which the story is told of a highwayman who had successfully established an alibi by riding in a single day, without a change of horses, from Chatham in Kent to York, where he arrived in the ...”