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“... of self-fashioning, he is an essentially Jacobean product. Sometime after the accession of King James in 1603, he gained entry to the court of the precocious young Prince of Wales. According to Bishop Fuller, ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his servant. Sweetmeats and Coryate made up the last course on all court entertainments.’ In ...”

“... ecclesiastical development’. The whipping-boy in Clark’s narrative is the 18th-century jurist, William Blackstone, theorist of ‘the English doctrine of sovereignty’ as indivisible and indefeasible. Blackstone argued that, under the particular historical conditions of the British Constitution, Parliament was ‘the place where that absolute despotic ...”

“... nature. Invited in 1873 to join a new society for metropolitan physicists, the Cambridge professor James Clerk Maxwell set out in his witty way the practical philosophy of this public science. He thought soirées were like clouds of gas particles: they allowed buttonholing only during the brief if violent collisions of their participants. Lecture-rooms were ...”

“... Cavendish Square, north of Oxford Street, but still retained a mansion of 50 rooms in St James’s Square, along with other properties. As a man of commerce he invested in everything from coal to oysters, from soap to slaving, none of which commended him to Old Money. The dukes of Richmond, descended from a royal mistress, notoriously reaped a ...”

“... philosophical investigation into aspects of meaning in Mozart’s last three symphonies to James McKinnon’s critique of the myth of the Phrygian aulos, the instrument whose exciting and sensuous sound was supposedly rejected on ethical grounds. The collection starts well, with a scrupulous examination by Christoph Wolff of Mozart’s arrangement of ...”

“... important friends were wealthy men with a taste for the arts – his neighbour Uvedale Price, Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador at Naples, and the collector Charles Townley. By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as ...”

“... too glad to avoid vengeance from his fellows by impersonating the great in perpetual concealment; James Pool and Suzanne Pool’s Who financed Hitler?, which opens with a luxurious gathering of bankers and party ‘higher-ups’ with their sleek women, just a shade less exotic than the gathering in a Japanese restaurant of Spanish-speaking kameraden that ...”

“... royal entourage and its hangers-on: Lord Snowdon, Raine Spencer, Major Ronald Ferguson, Koo Stark, James Hewitt, Madam Vasso and the rest. Thus described by Kelley, the House of Windsor is part Evelyn Waugh, part Tom Sharpe, wholly Spitting Image. It is not so much that she descends to personalities as that she is incapable of rising above them. But this is ...”

“... In July​ 1657 William Wood, a young immigrant to Maryland, was paddling along a creek of the Patuxent River when he found a body floating in the water. Dragging the corpse to land, he discovered it was Harry Gouge, a servant of John Dandy’s, whose watermill Wood had just left. He fetched Dandy, who came with two other men ...”

“... idiot in the ways of the world’, an ‘anomalous character’, envious, blundering, clownish. James Prior’s full, scholarly biography, designed to restore Goldsmith’s dignity, did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and ...”

“... Noye’s Fludde, and they were in peril when the words of that hymn were written in 1860 by William Whiting. A poem can let you step into a moment that is always – or as Culler puts it in his not always light-footed prose – lyric ‘is not the description and interpretation of a past event but the iterative and iterable performance of an event in ...”

“... Not surprisingly, a number of the Freedom Riders later became important advocates of black power. William Worthy and Conrad Lynn – two of the members of the original Journey of Reconciliation – created the all-black Freedom Now Party less than two years after the Rides ended. By 1965, CORE had jettisoned its integrationism for an emphasis on black-led ...”

“... providing water to strangers, and they were civilised ones. Sharia, the environmental academic James Salzman writes in Drinking Water: A History, means ‘the way to water’. There were limits to what Salzman called the Right of Thirst: you could ask for water, but not for enough to slake the thirst of your camels or your fields. Water, in Salzman’s ...”

“... and keeping the maximum number of plates spinning with flicks of punctuation. It would do Henry James’s vision more violence to translate his books into an English deprived of intermediate stops than to render them in a comma-rich Esperanto. The novels of Proust and Mann would lose much of their intellectual flavour if commas were rationed. Céline took ...”

“... In 1598 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were forced to dismantle James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, which they had occupied since their foundation in 1594, so they transported it across the Thames and built their own playhouse on the Bankside. This was the building whose 20th-century replica was christened ‘Shakespeare’s Globe ...”