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“... first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas Davies, who described ‘his aweful approach … somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father’s ghost, “Look, my Lord, it comes.”’ ‘Remember me’ was Boswell’s mandate from ...”

“... had to put it back in. Greek, however, was even less accessible than Latin in an England where, as Thomas More calculated in 1533, only about half the population could read even their own language. Erasmus, like the founder of sacred comparative philology, Lorenzo Valla in Italy in the 1440s, annotated his text in Latin; he also supplied a Latin ...”

“... aristocratic houses, but was now adapted by the chattering classes as a room for secluded leisure. Thomas Mower’s parlour contained a set of bells that were played with a mallet, while that of Matthew Phelips, a former mayor of London, was bedecked with cushions (eight with griffons, seven with lions), painted hangings, benches, a turned chair and an ...”

“... of statues reduced to pigeon roosts. In the middle of a voter registration drive in Atlanta, Martin Luther King Sr allowed the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir, dressed as house slaves, to sing for a ball celebrating the 1939 première of Gone with the Wind. His ten-year-old son was dressed as a pickaninny. King was criticised by his fellow Baptist ...”

“... homosexual men, and the fifth a titled woman, sister to a Cabinet Minister. The principal males, Martin Murray and Gavin Blair Summers, are, Binding informs us, modelled on Stephen Spender and Giles Romilly. Fellow Travellers thinly fictionalises a passage in Spender’s life which he has himself recollected in World within World. In 1933, the poet (in the ...”

“... every muscle to take on the form of a diary or ‘Waste Book’ kept by an American settler called Thomas Keene in the early part of the 19th century. Instead of dialogue or traditional narrative we get inventories, shopping lists, poems, drawings and diagrams (courtesy, as a footnote whimsically informs us, of ‘the ...”

“... have their place in a tally of the 20th century’s most memorable images. The last of the five, Martin Munkácsi, made no single photograph that has a firm place in such lists, but The First Fashion Photograph for Harper’s Bazaar (1933) showing Lucile Brokaw running by the sea, makes clear why he was as broadly influential as any of them. He proved models ...”

“... there is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album produced in the late 1800s for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, a group of inhabitants pack the end of a narrow alley as though swept down it the way rubbish is swept down a gutter. Such ...”

“... they make rather an unfair sort of comedy team. Not Hope-Crosby, nor Abbott-Costello, more like Martin-Lewis. As his initials suggest, F.X. is the son of a Roman Catholic mother and he is (by Tula Springs standards) almost as slick and Italianate as Dean Martin – ‘Hey, brothers, pour the wine!’ – while Bobby ...”

“... In March 1932​ , Thomas Mann visited Weimar in central Germany. For the last thirty years of the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by the 1930s it had become a hotbed of the radical right. ‘The admixture of Hitlerism and Goethe affects one strangely,’ Mann wrote in ‘Meine Goethereise ...”

“... has suffered repeated jolts to its 16th and 17th-century foundations. In The Political World of Thomas Wentworth – a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and ...”

“... like other areas with old religious or monastic connections (the Whitefriars, the Minories, St Martin le Grand, St Katherine by the Tower), was one of London’s quasi-autonomous ‘liberties’, and so not governed by the lord mayor. The second was that there had already been a theatre in the area, immediately adjacent to the building on which Burbage’s ...”

“... contained concentrated political analysis which interrupted the flow of Orwell’s narration. Hugh Thomas’s book first appeared in 1961 and was then the first major historical study of the war, written at a time when no one in Spain could contemplate writing an objective study of any part of its modern history. With its revised editions of 1965 and 1976, it ...”

“... Every thing is wet,’ Martin Benson recorded, after inspecting his cargo. ‘Not a single hogshead that we have yet opened, but has been wet with salt water.’ Benson came from Newport, Rhode Island, and had sailed from there with tobacco, cotton cloths and rum to the British colony of Sierra Leone. A former slave trader, Benson now worked in the service of abolition, and his concern about the wet goods was not simply for his own fortune; he also worried for the cause of ‘legitimate commerce’, one of two key concepts at the heart of Bronwen Everill’s incisive history of political economy and ‘ethical capitalism’ in the age of abolition ...”

“... advanced Protestant ideas propagated by John Cheke, master of King’s and tutor to Edward VI, and Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg theologian and Regius Professor of Divinity in Edwardian Cambridge, as well as by his years in Basel, where English exiles gathered during the reign of Mary I. There he shared lodgings with the martyrologist John Foxe in a former ...”