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“... of homosexual fellatio’. Then he cools us down. ‘That is to move too far ahead.’ Thomas Carlyle, another prodigious filler of shelves, reckoned that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ The pathos formula perfected by Ackroyd. Carlyle did not enjoy such a smooth passage. ‘Swimming in the Mother of Dead Dogs, and ...”

“... Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography when you were a kid?’‘I ...”

“... Marlowe had obtained more substantial patronage than he received from the Countess of Pembroke and Thomas Walsingham, these stories might not have been told very differently. The exciting instability about Marlovian drama, our uncertainty as to whether Dr Faustus is a morality play or a parody of one, whether The Massacre at Paris is a tragedy or a black ...”

“... Prince of Wales’s gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders ...”

“... sought out writers who struck him more as ‘plain folks’. He found a kindred spirit in Edward Thomas, then a struggling prose writer, who considered him the ‘greatest friend’ of his life (not long before Thomas enlisted in 1915, he seriously considered relocating to New Hampshire to farm and help Frost run a ...”

“... villainy. 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and ...”

“... for all the question of why Gillray should have poured his enormous talent into a ‘minor art’. Henry Fielding’s Shamela – just a smack at Pamela – was largely confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast that ...”

“... shrouded corpse of Oliver Cromwell, dead on 3 September 1658, was disinterred from the east end of Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey and, along with the purported corpses of two other regicides, conveyed to Tyburn, where the three dead men were executed on 30 January 1661. Left hanging all day, the now re-dead bodies were decapitated and thrown ...”

“... he was 21, his father decamped to South Africa). His marriage to Mary Ellen Nicolls, daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, one of his writer heroes, ended in 1857 after she absconded with the painter Henry Wallis. Meredith took sole custody of their four-year-old son, Arthur; Mary Ellen died in 1861. There are photographs of ...”

“... use of ritual disguises and blackened faces in attacks on deer-parks in the Kentish Weald during Henry VIII’s reign, but offers no comment on this manifestation of a phenomenon whose 18th-century form is familiar from the pages of E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters. In the course of an interesting account of some 16th-century riots at ...”

“... succeeded admirably in capturing the rich for religion and was put on the list of royal chaplains. Thomas Darling struggled manfully as a curate in the evil rookery of St Giles-in-the-Fields, London but ended up running a tiny, undemanding parish in the City, overshadowed by St Paul’s. Robert Peter, a brilliant Classics scholar at Cambridge, ‘achieved so ...”

“... his drinking bouts. Under the prosecutor’s eye he can be made to look like a less amiable Dylan Thomas. The merit of the stories and poems called in to excuse or justify such a life has also been questioned. D.H. Lawrence called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both ...”

“... who has produced the strongest case against his brothers has spurned the mantle of revolutionary. Thomas McKeown has long argued on epidemiological grounds that modern medicine cannot claim much credit for the shift in mortality and morbidity in the Western world. Criticism of medicine which attempts to penetrate its vital organs has always come from ...”

“... that it was in / And was in what the place was’ is how a verbal sketch of a reclining figure by Henry Moore begins (A Man in My Position); and for a specimen of his tangled line in love-poetry one could hardly improve on a snippet from ‘Morning Song’ in The World’s Room (1974), where the loved one is treated to an especially problematical ...”

“... Charles Eliot Norton lectures she declares, with no shadow of demonstration or argument, that Thomas Hardy the poet ‘cannot by any standard of evaluation be called great’. Though an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford obviously speaks on such matters with authority, for Dame Helen to deliver herself of this ex cathedra judgment solely ...”