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“... literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government,’ Thomas Macaulay wrote in 1848. Macaulay knew very well that the Restoration licensing system was leaky and erratic in practice, and that it ended more by accident than design – or at least for reasons unrelated to freedom of ...”

“... of names and places are buzzing around: the 17th-century antiquarian was William Dugdale, not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was ...”

“... to the craft of writing, he always wanted to disguise the vulgarities of effort, and nowhere more than in the comedies and farces of the 1730s, eight of which appear in this volume of Thomas Lockwood’s edition of Fielding’s drama. A third and final volume of plays is in preparation, and will complete the Wesleyan ...”

“... an escape from his troubled homeland. By 1575 he was back in his native Belgium, a Catholic once more, now with a nagging Catholic wife on whom he was to blame his subsequent inconstancies. Four years later, when civil war presented fresh inconveniences, he moved north and adopted the Calvinism of his new home at Leiden. He stayed there for 15 ...”

“... me to say this is envy. It is for you to say that this is envy.’ Gautier expressed the sentiment more gracefully, and not just because he did so in French: ‘Avis aux critiques. C’est un grand avantage de n’avoir rien fait, mais il ne faut pas en abuser.’ The only, feeble reply to which is: ‘What would you know, achiever?’ Anyway, whether or not ...”

“... brickmaker’s wife, who was made to pay a fine to avoid being ‘well whipped’. Marshfield was more fortunate than the quarrelsome midwife Margaret Jones, who had been hanged for witchcraft on Boston Common in June 1648, or the servant Mary Johnson, pregnant with an illegitimate child, who was condemned six months later, having confessed to ‘familiarity ...”

“... the size of sheep farms. Knowing Wales is a valid unit of area (equivalent to 20,770 km2) is much more useful than being prepared to rub noses north of the Arctic Circle. Here are some uses: the Amazon rainforest is being cleared at the rate of a Wales a year; the largest crater on the Moon is three times the size of Wales. When that piece of Antarctica came ...”

“... The paper was started in Madison, Wisconsin, in the late 1980s. It went online a decade later, and more recently its offices have relocated to New York. There were those who feared the metropolitanisation would blunt its edge: you can see for yourself whether or not this is true by visiting www.theonion.com (I can’t at the moment, thanks to the ever ...”

“... and ‘Robin’ were all used to characterise Walpole as an ambitious upstart, heading for a fall. More often, names were gutted or (as Henry Fielding put it) ‘emvowelled’, with dashes or asterisks replacing key letters or every character except the first. This technique had rich potential. It could cast a marketable aura of the clandestine over even quite ...”

“... he’s going to Cambridge. It’s an outrage. Never mind that Bristol would have known that it was more than likely Cambridge would make him an offer, and even more likely he’d take it up, so that whether thay made an offer or not was likely to be, for want of a better word, academic. Spoilt-bastard effrontery is immune to ...”

“... would have been a deal-breaker if he had. In any case, the British head of counter-espionage was more than happy to hire the services of Okhrana agents, and Reilly signed on with Melville in 1896.Soon afterwards he met Margaret Thomas, the much younger Irish wife of a rich Welsh clergyman. Reverend ...”

“... name on a communal bookplate; for £150 you get a book to yourself; and for donations of £1000 or more you can choose which book you get (comedian, football fan and former English teacher Frank Skinner has apparently made an early bid for Johnson’s Dictionary). You also get a certificate and the chance to attend an annual ‘meet your ...”

“... telephone system for deaf people and a device to save epileptics from drowning in the bath. The more work he has done with computers and artificial neural networks, however, the more convinced he has become that it won’t be long before there are autonomous machines that are ...”