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“... they came to have their portraits painted ‘in little’ by the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, who lived and worked on Gutter Lane for 35 years. If you were very posh or very rich Hilliard came to you, but his bread and butter was what he called ‘common’ work – in other words, doing portraits of commoners – and this more middling ...”

“... Jelinek was already 22. This was the high-water mark in Austria’s radical postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within ...”

“... today’s dollars. The seamstresses of the International Latex Corporation were extraordinary, as Nicholas de Monchaux explains in his 2011 book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. ‘The most valued seamstresses were those like Roberta Pilkenton, who could sew together the outer Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment’s 17 concentric layers, with hundreds of yards of ...”

“... tradition that Shakespeare acted the part of Hamlet’s ghostly father (first mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née ...”

“... Morrison, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert Conquest), though several of them can lay claim to more ...”

“... in particular make it possible to identify Burton’s circle of scholarly friends, among whom Thomas Hobbes was the most famous. Many others were famous in the history of early Oxford science: Henry Briggs, Thomas Lydyat, John Napier, Edmund Gunter. Almost three quarters of his collection, in fact, was made up of books ...”

“... Choosing​ a husband for Elizabeth I was always going to be tricky, but in 1560 the diplomat Nicholas Throckmorton announced that he’d figured it out. Throckmorton’s choice would strengthen Elizabeth’s claim to the throne, unite the island of Britain and guarantee peace with France. His candidate was intelligent (if not quite as scholarly as Elizabeth), above average height (at five foot eleven), well educated, attractive, good humoured, age appropriate, healthy and athletic, and shared Elizabeth’s interests in music, dancing, hawking and riding ...”

“... century, almost 150 years after Vesalius and the beginning of bio-medicine, the great physician Thomas Sydenham observed that he knew old market women in Covent Garden who understood botany better than medical students did. Until the discovery of antibiotics, the same old women could probably prescribe as well as the most learned doctor. Huge advances in ...”

“... began on 8 May 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by its chairman, Parnell Thomas, and its chief investigator, Robert Stripling, ‘set up shop’ at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. The first response by the industry to notice of an investigation appeared forthright and dignified. A Committee for the First Amendment was formed, and ...”

“... happily. In his essays ‘Concealment and Exposure’ and ‘The Shredding of Public Privacy’, Thomas Nagel argues for the importance of a clear division between public and private spheres. He is less appalled by our constitutional doubleness than impressed by the success with which we maintain it, seeing it as a sign of our humanity. It is through our ...”

“... size of the promised portion, only when actually in court. According to Belott’s friend Daniel Nicholas, Shakespeare at first said when questioned on Belott’s behalf that Mountjoy had promised a dowry of ‘about the some of ffyftye poundes in money and Certayne Houshould stuffe’. The Court of Requests ultimately referred the matter to the elders of ...”

“... life and its ultimate debacle with a clumsily broad brush. The milieu she describes of ‘Terry-Thomas dashers and Kay Kendall girls’ lacking in social ‘self-awareness’, for whom ‘the threat of levelling tendencies’ and ‘the encroachment of Lucky Jim Dixon’ had yet to loom, is as crude a caricature as anything in the press coverage of the ...”

“... Conventional criticism allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and ...”

“... gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets’. As these few tasters from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais indicate, swearing can be fun: ‘slabberdegullion druggels’ (slovenly dimbos) and ‘noddie meacocks’ (limp-wristed wimps) have the surreal energy of abuse forged in the heat. But Urquhart’s list of obscenities ...”

“... benefit of the institute. The Warburg Institute’s advisory council, through its chairman, Keith Thomas, took a view similar to mine. Our protests did not have much effect, because it wasn’t until late in 2004 that the university even asked to see a copy of the deed, not being able to locate its own. By then the vice-chancellor, Graeme Davies, had already ...”