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“... awful’. Early memoirists take us further with Swift’s character, but only so far. His godson Thomas Sheridan recalled that ‘he always appeared to the world in a mask, which he never took off but in the company of his most intimate friends.’ Yet this unmasking, such as it was, only seems to have confused things further. The most memorable assessments ...”

“... does not expand or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life ...”

“... are jokes scattered elsewhere about other 1790s works, including the ‘philosophical novels’ of William Godwin and his school. Nightmare Abbey’s isolated coastal setting draws on Godwin’s Mandeville (published in 1817, when Peacock probably read it with the Shelleys), a work caricatured in the novel as ‘Devilman, a novel’, all ‘Hatred – revenge ...”

“... founded the shop in 1698 at the southern end of St James’s Street; one of her daughters married William Pickering, and the shop remained with the Pickering family until 1810, when George Berry renamed the shop after himself. It was an ‘Italian warehouse’, as grocers’ shops specialising in imported goods were known. The shield hanging above the front ...”

“... Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of Bedford had imitated to Lord John Russell who imitated it to Bertrand Russell who imitated it to ...”

“... at that time his friend. What sort of man, he had asked Erasmus, was this kindred poetic spirit Thomas More, fellow-condemner of court life and author of the diverting Utopia, as well as admirably an admirer of Hutten’s own satire on monkish blankness and obscurantism, Letters from Nonentities (Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum)? Erasmus’s reply did for More ...”

“... even if the correspondence that followed soon retreated into an altercation about what Just William may or may not have got up to.Blake Morrison’s As If, a study of the Bulger case, was published in 1997. The conclusions to be drawn from reading it are not particularly original: the boys should never have been tried in an adult court; children need ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the poem handsomely on the page. For the great bibliographer D.F. McKenzie, Tonson’s Works of Mr William Congreve (1710) is a masterpiece in which all aspects of the book’s physical appearance contribute to literary meaning. Tonson adapted better than Dryden to the consequences of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 that brought ...”

“... feels ‘rigged’. The scholar who spoke most successfully to this indignation was the economist Thomas Piketty, whose Capital in the 21st Century (2013) used tax data and other archival sources to demonstrate that rising inequality has been a basic tendency of capitalist societies for at least two hundred years.* The reason for this, simply put, is that ...”

“... 1841, the whaling ship Acushnet, newly built at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, fell in with the whaler William Wirt, of Nantucket, near the Pacific island of Juan Fernández (Alexander Selkirk’s lonely home during the years 1704-9), off the coast of Chile. One of the Acushnet’s fo’c’sle crew was the young Herman Melville. The two ships hove to for a few ...”

“... perhaps, but also a reminder that Curll, by publishing the 1725 Works, did more than anyone before Thomas Hollis in the 1760s to keep alive Marvell’s reputation. Curll’s intertwining of seduction and sedition was targeted and exploited by the authorities, and his belated prosecution for publishing pornographic titles including Venus in the ...”

“... Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ghost of Tyndale ...”

“... both rights and reason are under several kinds of open and covert attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend.’ In the event, between the dedication and the final sentence the book says nothing about Iraq or the war on terror, perhaps in silent acknowledgment of the difficulty of knowing ...”

“... on the beach’ was the title of a 19th-century song that has become a saying. ‘Dear Henry,’ William James wrote to his physician friend Henry Bowditch, ‘you see that you are not the only pebble on the beach, or toad in the puddle of senile degeneration.’ ‘What is a pebble?’ is the opening sentence of Clarence Ellis’s book The Pebbles on the ...”