Three years before the Great War, Rudyard Kipling recalled how one English king simply paid his bullying neighbours to stay at home.

Marullus was disgusted at the way that the fickle people of Rome turned so easily from one hero to another.

William Cowper told Lady Hesketh about a walk beside the river at Olney, and the affecting behaviour of his spaniel Beau.

On his way to war-torn France, William Wordsworth passed through London and was overwhelmed by the quiet of the early morning.

Seventeenth-century poet and statesman Edmund Waller reflects on the benefits of advancing years.

Vice is a fact of life, wrote Pope, and God can even bring good out of it; but vice is never a virtue and in tackling vice together we make our society stronger.