“... and translations of the Book of Psalms, the original book of Dave – supposedly written by King David, the Neim Z’mirot Yisrael (‘the sweet singer of Israel’) – ‘substantially shaped the culture of 16th and 17th-century England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as singing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic ...”

“... Hermine; Fania Pascal, who taught him Russian in the 1930s; F.R. Leavis, the literary critic; John King, who attended Wittgenstein’s lectures and became a friend; M.O’C. Drury, a close friend over many years, who gives an unmatched account of Wittgenstein’s spiritual concerns; Rush Rhees, another close friend, who provides a thoughtful, restrained ...”

“... Bernini felt to be beneath him. To bother with them personally, he explained, would be like the King of France giving an audience to a poor widow over a matter of a few pence. He did claim, on the other hand, of his bust of Charles I, that he had taken ‘as much care for the packing as studye in making of itt’. He was worried to learn that it was ...”

“... target was Burke as the author of Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770), an attack on the King, or at any rate on the Palace, as seeking to influence, to frustrate and to corrupt Parliament through a cabal of secret and confidential advisers. This was an old charge with a complicated history: it owed something to Bolingbroke, whom Burke very ...”

“... virtue, making reading the book like saying ‘a tragic, pagan, exotic rosary’. Another admirer, Francis Wyndham, stayed non-committal about the subject-matter: ‘The narrator is a young girl in love with a married man. That is the “story”.’ Wyndham proved not to be cautious enough. From the Journals now published it would seem that not one but two or ...”

“... of lyric and Gothic clichés as well as a bizarre ‘Fragment, Supposed to be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé’ (the assassins, respectively, of Henri IV and Jean Paul Marat), and a provocative subtitle – ‘Being Poems Found Amongst the Papers of that Noted Female who Attempted the Life of the ...”

“... with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’. This was the primary reason King James II was forced out and replaced by reliably Protestant co-rulers, William and Mary. This Revolution brought in its train several other constitutional changes. Within two decades the succession had been diverted through the Act of Settlement (1701) to ...”

“... of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by John Day, another playwright, in 1599. John Lyly, who gave up writing for 15 years ...”

“... more than simply years, though living from 1705 to 1793 was a good start. As chief justice of the King’s Bench for 32 years, he modernised an antiquated system of common law and rationalised a diffuse system of mercantile law; he drafted statutes; he played a central role in politics as cabinet member, counsellor and confidant; he knew everyone from Boswell ...”

“... up support for Palatine restitution and raise funds in London. In 1634, Elizabeth’s agent, Sir Francis Nethersole, was arrested after failing to obtain sanctuary at the Dutch ambassador’s house in London. Outraged by the seizure of her private papers, Elizabeth fumed at the implied suspicion that ‘I have any evil plots against my ...”

“... left on the island of Roanoke to establish some kind of encampment. They hitched a lift home with Francis Drake after deciding that supply ships were not going to arrive. Further settlers went out to Virginia in 1587 on the promise of five hundred acres each, and were again left to fend for themselves while English shipping was preoccupied with fighting off ...”

“... Fleet was preparing to repel further surface raids on convoys. Admiral Tovey, in the battleship King George V, had with him a carrier, Victorious, with a team of untried pilots, and a new battleship, Prince of Wales, which still carried civilians, who were trying to sort out its slightly wonky guns, and finally the battle-cruiser Hood, the darling of the ...”

“... nailed to the top of the cross reads, in Hebrew, Greek and Latin: ‘This is Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.’ But where Pacheco’s Christ is flat and hieratic, a 17th-century Pantocrator, Zurbarán’s is mortal. His torso leans to one side to suggest the weight of his flesh. A crumpled cartellino at the base of the cross says: ‘Franco Dezur/Fa ...”

“... the Muslim armies profited from the unpopul-arity of the ruling Visigoths. In July, Tarik defeated King Roderic, and the local population flocked to join the army that had rid them of an oppressive ruler. By the autumn, Córdoba and Toledo had both fallen. As it became clear that Tarik was determined to take the whole peninsula, an envious Musa bin Nusayr left ...”

“... of the Lambs; his obsession with angels (he has an enormous one tattooed on his back) recalls Francis Dolarhyde’s sub-Blakean mysticism; and the shaving-off of all his body hair seems very much the sort of thing that one of Harris’s sexually-disoriented psychopaths would do. Above all, there is the emphasis on ...”