“... A creative artist has to be painfully honest with himself,’ R.S. Thomas declared in his autobiography, Neb: He has to look as objectively as possible at his creations. What is the point of pretending that his poem is a good one if it is not? But can the same honesty be expected of other people? Are not so many of life’s activities a means of escaping from self-knowledge? How many people could persevere, if they knew in their hearts they were quite unimportant ...”

“... first-born daughter, had acceded to the throne following the death of Henry’s teenage son, Edward VI. As fervently Catholic as Edward had been Protestant, Mary was determined to restore papal supremacy in England. She was the product of an Anglo-Spanish marriage: her mother was Henry VIII’s first, divorced ...”

“... were fluid. Can we even pigeonhole Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’ and George, duke of Clarence (Edward IV’s brother) as Yorkist when the consequence of their rebellion in 1469-70 was the restoration of Henry VI to the throne? Rather than one extended series of Wars of the Roses, it has become fashionable to divide England’s thirty years of instability ...”

“... one of her own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of ...”

“... and miniature blown-glass bimbos, as a not so grand finale. In between, we have everything from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cole to Thomas Eakins to Thomas Hart Benton; from Mary Cassatt to Georgia O’Keeffe to Eva Hesse; from the ...”

“... be a scandal to be unearthed secured the immediate attention of journalists all over the world. Edward Schillebeeckx’s work on Christology was not news until he was summoned to Rome. Then he was at once conscripted as a character in that so often rewritten melodrama – Brecht’s Galileo is the canonical text for our time – The valiant searcher for ...”

“... was a belief that Henry VII should be better known, and that is also a guiding principle of Thomas Penn’s account of the last decade of his reign. Today’s historians have tried to get away from what Stanley Chrimes called ‘seductive Baconian phrases’; their aim has been to resist Bacon’s ‘imaginative power’ and understand the king and his ...”

“... more rapturous the explanation offered. Barnett Newman painted a vertical stripe on a canvas, and Thomas Hess saw it as a version of divine creation – ‘as God separated light from darkness, with a line drawn in the void’. (The metaphor does not even correspond to the painting, since Newman’s line divides one darkness from another.) Coleridge wrote in ...”

“... has made monotone what was polychrome, are indigo (blue), gamboge (yellow) and brown lake (purple).Thomas Girtin was born in 1775 and died at 27, perhaps of asthma, although nameless dissipation and even sitting sketching on cold ground have been given as possible causes of death. What he achieved in his short life shows how various the tasks undertaken by a ...”

“... Boies were fooles.’ Marlowe seems to have died in a manner appropriate to the writer of Edward II and Dr Faustus. His perceived personal style appeals much more obviously than Shakespeare’s to an Anglo-American academy invested in the idea that Renaissance poets ought above all to have been subversive, and he is enjoying more scholarly attention ...”

“... the maskers seem to improvise witty or pathetic dialogue, according to an agreed storyline. D.M. Thomas remarks that he is indebted to Germaine Greer for supplying him with information about the tradition of the improvisatrici in Italy: he has constructed Swallow (‘the second,’ he says, ‘in a series of improvisational novels’) in the form of a story ...”

“... liberties himself, Powell chose to betray his own party and plot with Harold Wilson to defeat Edward Heath. I visited Pentonville Prison in December, on a tour to mark the jail’s 175th anniversary. No phones, no laptops – instant isolation and unease. Pentonville was considered a model new prison when it was built in the 1840s – the idea that each ...”

“... beyond what would become Russell Square. It survives as a tomb-laden garden tucked behind the Thomas Coram Foundation Museum.The exhibition encourages you to find modern parallels to things which are, at first sight, of their time. Last month’s papers showed the lucky few holding up numbered tickets to the public gallery at the Hutton Inquiry. Two ...”

“... her husband, their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her ...”

“... traders’ India. White men happily took up hookahs, flowing dresses and local lovers. His father, Thomas Brooke, a prosperous High Court judge in the service of the East India Company, had a local mistress and an illegitimate child, for whom he provided in his will, and Mrs Brooke was herself almost certainly illegitimate and may have been Eurasian. ...”