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“... agents at witchcraft trials, burnt alongside Protestants by Mary Tudor and alongside Catholics by Elizabeth I, roasted at country fairs and persecuted for sport, cats were often given short shrift in Britain. Ancient symbols of fertility, they were commonly deemed lascivious (the female cat was especially lecherous), but feline stand-offishness was the real ...”

“... her own, as in everyone else’s, eyes she was a bas bleu. Like her elder sisters in Sensibility, Elizabeth Carter, or the Ladies of Llangollen, whom she greatly admired, she sought with her self-education to adhere to a ‘system’ or working timetable. Had she not read The Proper Employment of Time, Talents and Fortune by the Llangollen Ladies’ friend ...”

“... tell us that on 29 May 1953, three days before the coronation of our present beleaguered Queen Elizabeth II, Edmund (later Sir Edmund) Hillary and Namgyal Wangdi, a devoutly Buddhist Sherpa, or poorly-paid professional climber, known by his spiritual title, Tenzing Norgay (‘fortunate follower of religion’), stood on the summit that Mallory and Irvine ...”

“... Colour brought photographs of champion roses (‘Birmingham Post’, a cross between ‘Queen Elizabeth’ and ‘Wendy Cussons’, from the National Rose Society’s Annual) and of rather dull canapés (from Good Housekeeping Colour Cookery of 1967). Nothing, it seemed, was so distant, hidden or commonplace that its appearance would be unrecorded for ...”

“... leaves her ‘exactly in the condition of Lord Hardy and Lady Charlotte in The Funeral’ (by Steele). Her rift with the theatre manager Fleetwood is glossed over with a quote from Peachum. Even in moments of trauma, her sense of theatre is uppermost. Returning home one night to find her baby daughter in convulsive fits, she snatches the girl into her ...”

“... of the Licensing Act of 1695, and a new breed of journalists like Defoe, Bolingbroke, Addison and Steele emerged to meet the demand. What they reveal is the dogged persistence of Whig and Tory tags, a vociferous ideological debate which Hume’s History was specifically intended to mitigate and which Namier ignores. Ironically, Hume would have wished for a ...”

“... of novels) is historical in much the same way that Gone with the Wind and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex are historical. It takes a familiar time, draws a horizontal line along an axis, and marks it out with peak events everyone has heard of, weighting them with their most commonplace interpretations. This is then used as a moving backdrop in ...”

“... Boswell’s Life of Johnson did, or a Thackeray novel in which characters encountered Addison and Steele in taverns. Someone famous was sure to turn up on each page: Joshua Reynolds, perhaps, or Mrs Siddons, or mad King George III. The diary gave ‘fresh colours to the pale and faded portraits of past ages’, a reviewer for the Gentleman’s Magazine ...”

“... girls, but doesn’t follow this up by examining the remarkable letters written by Mrs Thrale, the Elizabeth Montagu set, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Elizabeth Foster; the Duchess’s novel Sylph is not treated, either. In the second half of the book, ‘Literary Achievements’, we are on ...”

“... Samuel Butler complete. Pope complete, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. Addison complete. Steele complete. Swift complete. Prior, Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the ...”

“... incestuous, Austen reserves the excitement of conflict for those characters erotically attracted: Elizabeth and Darcy, Emma and Knightley. But these arguments are unnecessary given a simple fact. Sense and Sensibility is not about two sisters; it is about three sisters. 19-year-old Elinor and 17-year-old Marianne have a sister, the 13-year-old ...”

“... Austen’s nephew wrote in his Memoir of his aunt. In this traditionary way we learned that Miss Steele never succeeded in catching the Doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Philips’ clerks, and was content to be considered a star in the society of ...”

“... be taken seriously. In particular, the ‘control’ texts from other authors (Swift, Addison and Steele) do not include any of their mainstream political journalism (from the Examiner, Freeholder, Guardian or Englishman, for example), but of an obscure early unpublished pamphlet by Swift, supplemented even more strangely by two of the Bickerstaff ...”

“... correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that Baxter paid greater attention than White had to the racial caricature latent in cinema’s visual and verbal detail. It would be interesting to know what she made of the ...”

“... for the great English novel. Keeping up the pretence of a ‘correspondence’ between equals, Steele and Addison – and a few others like them – removed matters of taste from the heat of religious and political controversy. Art, as Schiller was to argue in his Letters on Aesthetic Education, was not simply a higher form of play that restored the ...”