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“... Library as Additional MSS 60168-60256, thanks to the good offices of Noakes’s widow, Thompson, William Lamont and others. What to do with this equivalent, for the archaeology of sectarian nonconformity, of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun? There followed from the appropriation of the Muggletonian archive a practical exploration of a ...”

“... They are good for the best and least complicated of reasons: the author can write. Wherever Gunner James Witte turns his eye he finds something interesting, needing studying, and he interests us in it too – amazingly. First, it is how, as a Territorial, to pose as a dashing royal Horse Artillery man. There was a tailor in the village where we were billeted ...”

“... friend over a long period. Like Cotton, Jonson was a pupil at Westminster of the great historian William Camden, with whom Cotton formed perhaps the most important friendship of his life. Any age can mock the values of another. Cotton’s antiquarianism is at times a tempting target. Member of Parliament for the archetypal rotten borough of Old ...”

“... between them these two engaging old monstres profanes have produced a book as entertaining as a James Bond novel with the same pace, excitement and high standard of consumer durables, feminine splendour and male chauvinist piggery. The Baron broke all the rules of seduction, he says, with ‘two exceptions. I never deflower and I do not persist if the lady ...”

“... coexist with separate Scottish imperial aspirations, and would continue to do so until the 1690s. James VI of Scotland, who went on to become James I of the Three Kingdoms, was as determined to impose Lowlands ‘civilitie’ on his ‘barbarous’ Gaelic Islands, by the sword if need be, as the English were to plant their ...”

“... held in higher esteem than ‘rhabarbarum’, which was believed to grow somewhere beyond Barbary (William Turner in the 16th century thought the ultimate source was Ethiopia). But neither of those commanded anything like the prestige or the prices of what was popularly known as ‘Chinese’ rhubarb – though whether it actually came from China was very far ...”

“... summary would go something like this. Towards the end of the 18th century, the Scottish genius James Hutton recognised that the Earth was of enormous antiquity, or, as he put it, showed ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’; furthermore, he correctly inferred the igneous origin of many rocks, unlike the Wernerians, who thought that these ...”

“... 17th centuries, alongside which later Viennese classicism appeared a bland retreat. When you hear William Byrd and Thomas Tallis for the first time, you don’t know where things are going; there are weird harmonies and tonal shifts, curious crooked cadences that loom suddenly from unlit verges. And such dissonances! In the cathedral, we loved to squeeze out ...”

“... a table convivially cluttered with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed ...”

“... or an old tune. My slightly frivolous title, ‘What Henry Knew’, takes us straight to Henry James, of course, and the (feeble) joke is meant, among other things, to indicate that I recognise how obvious a move this is, once we have started on the question of literature and knowledge. It was James who wrote so ...”

“... most unchanging thing about them. (As it was, one might add, the most unchanging thing about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who ...”

“... her Brunhilda. Bob Hope called her J.B. – for Jut Butt. Jerry Lewis called her Sylvia, but James Garner called her Sylvia-honey. Rock Hudson called her Eunice and sometimes Maude; she called him Ernie. Her son called her Sis. The character actor Billy de Wolfe called her Clara Bixby, and this is still what her friends call her. Marty Melcher, her third ...”

“... another pleasure of work seen in a provincial context. For example, Eardley studied briefly with James Cowie, whose painting of two schoolgirls (more Jean Brodie than Balthus, but with a bit of both) is tightly composed and painted – the opposite in handling and drawing of Eardley’s child portraits. It is not surprising that she argued with him. But to ...”

“... by political disagreements, Taylor, a known and convinced Tory and devotee of the prime minister, William Pitt, managed to remain on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true ...”

“... In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he perpend? No good being sparks, boys, waiting for the end. Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend, Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end ...”