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“... for the persecution of those with German names. ‘The fabric of our society is under threat.’ Henry Porter’s book was written in this climate. As its title promises, it is mostly about the lies that newspapers have told in the sample year of 1983-4. You read it with avidity, because the book is fluent and well-researched and appallingly funny, but ...”

“... his land’. After Cox’s death the next generation proved no less avaricious. The eldest son, Henry, was drowned by his brothers, John and Peter, so they could get at his inheritance, but when they ‘sat upon the division of the landes’ they were confronted with ‘the sight of a bear’, which they take to be a ‘sprite’. (This reprises a scene ...”

“... the New York Times critic Anatole Broyard, who died in 1990, was unmasked in the New Yorker by Henry Louis Gates. In the early 1950s, Broyard had threatened to sue the publishers of a novel by Chandler Brossard, Who Walk in Darkness, which contained a character evidently based on him. It began: ‘People said ...”

“... scholars habitually refer to Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, All Is True (Henry VIII) and The Two Noble Kinsmen, all composed between about 1607 and 1613 – between Shakespeare’s 43rd year and his 49th – compound the issue of genre with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and ...”

“... Archbishop Whitgift at Croydon. There was an early version of Hamlet, possibly by Kyd; a prototype Henry V, starring Dick Tarlton and William Knell. And, a little later, there were the first ventures of Ben Jonson – Hot Anger Soon Cooled, written with Thomas Dekker and Henry Porter, and Robert II, with ...”

“... not for 14 years. The end came in 1986. Waugh was the victim of a practical joke after his friend Henry Porter, who was working on the Sunday Times, sent him a letter apparently from Claire Tomalin, the paper’s literary editor, asking him to review Mae West Is Dead, Adam Mars-Jones’s selection of lesbian and gay fiction, adding that she would ...”

“... Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile. In the 1950s Jannice Henry, an 18-year-old doctor’s daughter from Surrey, fell in love with her father’s locum, Neil Micklem. Their affair lasted for years; Jannice hoped it would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter ...”

“... how different it would have been if Descartes had written: ‘We think, therefore we are.’ Roy Porter tells the story of evolving conceptions of human nature in the Enlightenment. The basic answer offered to the unstated second question is: ‘Living as we do in an originally Christian culture, we see ourselves as a mixture of flesh and spirit.’ The word ...”

“... of the three hundred Spartans commemorated in Simonides’ epigram on Thermopylae. For Sir Henry Newbolt there is no difference between the words of the school cricket captain with ‘Ten to make and the match to win’ and those of the schoolboy rallying the ranks when ‘the Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead.’ At the beginning of the First ...”

“... Laud, men who had risen to power, show expressions closer to those of Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII’s functionaries. Laud (the son of a Reading cloth merchant and, like the king, a short man) looks at the painter with raised eyebrows – maybe he will be glad when the session is over. In a double portrait, Wentworth appears determined; his ...”

“... of halfwits remained all too easy, as was revealed by the pathetic (mid-18th-cenrury) case of Henry Roberts, a simple fellow given to blowing at feathers, exploited by his grasping brothers, greedy for his inheritance. In England there was little call in Early Modern times to institutionalise such ‘natural fools’, and generally they were kept at home ...”

“... maker, the washerwoman and her daughter hawking dripping door to door. And, with some help from Henry Mayhew and from modern historians like Stedman Jones, Anna Davin has indeed delivered such segments of the Late Victorian and Edwardian labouring poor from the patronage of friend and foe. She has done so with a strong historical sympathy and a realism that ...”

“... to draw on a method known as ‘family reconstitution’, pioneered by the French scholar, Louis Henry. Simply put, family reconstitution aims to exploit to the full the fact that parish registers record baptisms, marriages and burials. Where such registers have been conscientiously kept, and if a sufficient percentage of parishioners passed all their lives ...”

“... ability to command a flattering reflection. If anyone thought that at 54 inches around the waist, Henry VIII was fat, they thought twice about saying so and in Holbein’s portraits of the king his bulk is translated into an image of monumentality and strength. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut was portrayed in sculpture as slender with delicate features. The ...”

“... common people going about their daily business. There’s the snatch of conversation in Henry IV, Part I when a couple of carriers grumble about the inn at Rochester, the worst on the road for fleas: ‘Why, they will allow us ne’er a jorden, and then we leak in your chimney; and your chamber-lie breeds fleas like a loach.’ While this is a touch ...”