“... Choosing​ a husband for Elizabeth I was always going to be tricky, but in 1560 the diplomat Nicholas Throckmorton announced that he’d figured it out. Throckmorton’s choice would strengthen Elizabeth’s claim to the throne, unite the island of Britain and guarantee peace with France. His candidate was intelligent (if not quite as scholarly as Elizabeth), above average height (at five foot eleven), well educated, attractive, good humoured, age appropriate, healthy and athletic, and shared Elizabeth’s interests in music, dancing, hawking and riding ...”

“... happily. In his essays ‘Concealment and Exposure’ and ‘The Shredding of Public Privacy’, Thomas Nagel argues for the importance of a clear division between public and private spheres. He is less appalled by our constitutional doubleness than impressed by the success with which we maintain it, seeing it as a sign of our humanity. It is through our ...”

“... began on 8 May 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by its chairman, Parnell Thomas, and its chief investigator, Robert Stripling, ‘set up shop’ at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. The first response by the industry to notice of an investigation appeared forthright and dignified. A Committee for the First Amendment was formed, and ...”

“... century, almost 150 years after Vesalius and the beginning of bio-medicine, the great physician Thomas Sydenham observed that he knew old market women in Covent Garden who understood botany better than medical students did. Until the discovery of antibiotics, the same old women could probably prescribe as well as the most learned doctor. Huge advances in ...”

“... size of the promised portion, only when actually in court. According to Belott’s friend Daniel Nicholas, Shakespeare at first said when questioned on Belott’s behalf that Mountjoy had promised a dowry of ‘about the some of ffyftye poundes in money and Certayne Houshould stuffe’. The Court of Requests ultimately referred the matter to the elders of ...”

“... Conventional criticism allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and ...”

“... life and its ultimate debacle with a clumsily broad brush. The milieu she describes of ‘Terry-Thomas dashers and Kay Kendall girls’ lacking in social ‘self-awareness’, for whom ‘the threat of levelling tendencies’ and ‘the encroachment of Lucky Jim Dixon’ had yet to loom, is as crude a caricature as anything in the press coverage of the ...”

“... gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets’. As these few tasters from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais indicate, swearing can be fun: ‘slabberdegullion druggels’ (slovenly dimbos) and ‘noddie meacocks’ (limp-wristed wimps) have the surreal energy of abuse forged in the heat. But Urquhart’s list of obscenities ...”

“... benefit of the institute. The Warburg Institute’s advisory council, through its chairman, Keith Thomas, took a view similar to mine. Our protests did not have much effect, because it wasn’t until late in 2004 that the university even asked to see a copy of the deed, not being able to locate its own. By then the vice-chancellor, Graeme Davies, had already ...”

“... platitudes, a civil servant mangling a story, a mime of minimal narrative competence which makes Thomas Mann’s bumbling Zeitblom look like Nabokov. ‘Insofar as the cliché can be used without irony,’ we read a little earlier, ‘he had become a respected literary voice.’ A cliché can’t be used without irony unless you forget it’s a cliché, and ...”

“... for all Jünger’s intelligence, from a conceptual currency debased by moral idiocy. According to Nicholas Boyle in his Foreword to The Dear Purchase, when this monograph appeared one of Stern’s older colleagues told him: ‘If you want to get on, do not write this sort of thing again.’ Stern, Boyle adds, ‘was incensed. He continued writing, and, in ...”

“... making possible TR’s preferred location for the Canal, Morris calls attention to a request from Nicholas Murray Butler, the President of Columbia University, for a list of Roosevelt’s favourite books. Segments devoted to the tense drama unfolding in Washington and the Caribbean alternate with bibliographies that display TR’s extraordinary ...”

“... sympathiser who seems to have regarded Asian exploration as a proving ground for the superman; Nicholas Roerich, the artist and barmy quester after the fabled hidden city of Shambhala; and many others. Evidently, the book is loosely focused and some of the figures whose lives Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac chronicle were in no sense protagonists in the ...”

“... exhibited at the RA in 1840 and much acclaimed. It was Roberts who, in 1842, recommended Dadd to Thomas Phillips, a Welsh lawyer who was setting out on an ambitious expedition taking in Constantinople and the Turkish coast in addition to the sites visited by Roberts. Dadd was to be Phillips’s artist companion, his expenses paid in return for watercolour ...”

“... are inspiring neighbours to slit each others’ throats.12 March. Reading P. Ackroyd’s Thomas More, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of Utopia and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not short of hypocrisy. It’s hard not to feel there is something specifically ...”