“... putrefying. Chopin was dissected at his own request, as was King Leopold I of Belgium. Hans Christian Andersen, convinced that foreign doctors were all charlatans, carried a card when he went abroad that said ‘I am not really dead.’ In the same will in which he established the Nobel prizes, Alfred Nobel also required that his arteries be opened ...”

“... It is a long time​ now since any undergraduate class used Mill’s An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, first published in 1865, as a set text. But it has happened. George Santayana, who graduated from Harvard College in 1886, has described in Persons and Places the teaching of Francis Bowen: But Harvard possessed safe, sober old professors also and oldest of all, ‘Fanny’ Bowen ...”

“... is eager to proclaim an evangel of some kind, and therefore must be aggressive. A story in William Trevor’s new collection, The Hill Bachelors, treats these themes in a surprising but apposite way. ‘Of the Cloth’ describes the declining days of a Church of Ireland clergyman, the Rev. Grattan Fitzmaurice, rector of the mountain parish of ...”

“... led to her own teenage breakdown, feelings of intense despair and, according to her brother William, severe self-repression. Withdrawn and unhappy, he recalled, she gave up chess, ‘simply because it made her too eager for a win’. Whether it was the eagerness she feared or the winning, the poems that began to appear in her journals during these ...”

“... merchant turned cattle herdsman), Sir Richard Bulkeley (an early 18th-century hunchback virtuoso), William Blake (‘I see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ‘imbecile’), preferred to leave the world rather than to understand or ...”

“... imperialist visions of highly regulated empires, as well as proposals for the creation of a new Christian state in Britain and a revived Christendom in Europe. They reflected the diverse range of political traditions that the Conservative Party contained.For a few on the far right the coming of war was itself a defeat. One Tory MP, Captain Archibald ...”

“... coveted and every altar required for consecration was treasure. Rulers cast their greedy eyes, as William of Malmesbury wrote in the 12th century, on a church with its ‘boxes of gold and silver full of dead men’s bones’. A king might want to melt down that gold to pay soldiers. The wonder-seeking faithful prized the stuff inside: namely, dead bodies or ...”

“... Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of Bombay; Thomas Olivers (‘The God of Abraham praise’), a ...”

“... William James​ is famous for two things: his work as a psychologist and philosopher, and his family. But before anything else he was a qualified doctor, who frequently pronounced on questions of bodily and mental health, his thought sharpened by his own experiences. He suffered from a bad back, a troublesome heart, poor eyesight and tenacious ‘suicidal musings ...”

“... Cid was placed on an ivory stool by the altar, where, for a decade, his relics greeted Christian pilgrims and converted Muslims and Jews. In the late 12th century, the knight’s exploits were enshrined in the anonymously authored Poema de mio Cid, transforming him into a protagonist of Spanish literature akin to Beowulf or Roland. From ...”

“... artists to whom I feel most deeply connected. Longing powers my own art.In the second volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud (Bloomsbury, £35), David Dawson, Lucian’s long-serving assistant, describes Susanna Chancellor, the woman who remained Lucian’s partner longer than anyone else, as ‘a proper woman, not one of these ...”

“... cultural value and left-wing politics. At one level there is a Christianised Leavisism: ‘If the Christian responds to the Spirit in a great novel he is responding to what is centrally human in it.’ ‘Centrally human’ marks out the author as a card-carrying Scrutineer, but one with the idiosyncratic view that the Holy Spirit is a real presence in the ...”

“... as a remedy against human pride!These comments show how important the Book of Psalms was to early Christian thinking. Sing a New Song is the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Morgan Library in New York last year which demonstrated that influence. The show, masterminded by Roger S. Wieck, the library’s head of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts until ...”

“... a thriving early 18th-century economy, in the form of a colony of heavily anthropomorphised bees. Christian and Stoic moralists recommended virtuous austerity, but Mandeville depicts its opposite, showing in his insect world ‘Millions endeavouring to supply/Each other’s lust and vanity’. But it transpires that this is far from a dystopia. Rather, vice ...”

“... a member of the Church of England who supported the High Church reforms carried out by William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury. This leaves us with the question: when did Milton become Milton? Nicholas McDowell’s new study, Poet of Revolution, tries to account for Milton’s transformation from ‘obscure student poet in the early ...”