“... Esau sells his birthright (Erstgeburt) to Jacob for a dish of lentils (Linsengericht). In the King James version, the passage reads as follows:Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.To illustrate the plight of industrial labour, Marx refashioned this ...”

“... interest-free loans – provided by Tice – into donations. Fiona Cottrell, an old girlfriend of King Charles, has given £750,000 over the past year. Her son, George, who has served eight months in a US jail for wire fraud, is among Farage’s most trusted lieutenants.But while the prospect of $100 million from Musk has receded, there are signs that Reform ...”

“... names Brancusi gave them often announce or imply religious themes: The Spirit of Buddha, The King of Kings, The Prodigal Son, The Wisdom of the Earth.) In two projects – one complete, the Tîirgu-Jiu complex in Romania, and another un-realised, ‘The Temple of Deliverance’ in Indore – Brancusi planned sculptural groups which night be reckoned to ...”

“... horned helmets as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the ...”

“... at Baalbek. The surrounding buildings are higher than they were when the church was built, but King George shows clear above the roof line, just as he does in Hogarth’s Gin Lane. All in all, the design of the church is majestic – original, strange and energetic. But from the office window we could see that weeds had found a foothold in the ...”

“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... begins with a famous largo, ‘Shade as it never was’ (Ombra mai fu), sung by the self-same King of Kings to his beloved: a plane tree. Aelian, a collector of amazing historical facts, provides the fullest account of this bizarre episode: That Xerxes fellow was a clown … he was slavishly devoted to a plane tree, as if the tree was something to be ...”

“... from his Utopia. Even so, it had been Erasmus who had given him letters to friends such as Peter Giles, dedicatee of Utopia, in Antwerp and it was Erasmus who saw to the publication of Lucian, the epigrams and Utopia, bustling about to secure commendatory letters and so enhance them. Erasmus also coined and disseminated the description ‘a man for all ...”

“... provides an audio commentary. And there are lots of educational backups, some, like lectures by Peter Ackroyd and Tom Paulin, now over, others, including various conferences and courses, still to come. The most visible, and in some ways the most instructive of the exhibits are those which demonstrate Blake’s technical innovations. Only one of his ...”

“... and Kay, Barroll and de Grazia and Razzell all made me think again about a life I thought I knew. Peter Razzell’s is the slightest of these three books, but it makes two important contributions to any reading of William Shakespeare’s life in Stratford. First, it places the career of William’s father John in the larger contexts of Stratford’s economic ...”

“... but Be’) The poem switches between dredged-up confessions (‘I did it, I myself, killing the King my father’) and jokes faster than any audience could keep up with. The brackets around ‘(seriously though)’ epitomise the poem’s tone: that moment when the comedian draws the breathless audience together and they don’t know whether they’ve been ...”

“... But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor England, is not overlooked. In The King’s Curse (2014) she was ground up by the great fictionalising machine that is Philippa Gregory, and in 2003 she was the subject of a major biography by Hazel Pierce: Margaret Pole: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership. Pierce’s book is thorough and ...”

“... add: ‘Why did gold become money in the first place?’ Or: ‘Will gold ever be money again?’ Peter Bernstein’s history of gold as money is very much better at answering the first question than the other two. Pecuniary anthropology is very, very perilous. In the absence of evidence, both Aristotle and Adam Smith made implausible conjectures about the ...”

“... fifty or sixty thousand. The 17th and 18th-century poor, in the days when Britain constituted what Peter Linebaugh has called a thanatocracy, are uncommemorated, as are the apprentices, the economic migrants and the vagrants who were hanged for trifling crimes against property. Even the infamous victims remain unnamed. There is no mention of Jack Sheppard, the ...”