“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 Withdrawn and unhappy, he recalled, she gave up chess, ‘simply because it made her too eager for a win’.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that of poet. It is also the story of a middle-aged man publicly confirming his identity as a Christian. Sisson compares joining the Church of England to giving oneself up to the police. ‘I had committed the crime – if it is one – of yielding to the persuasions of the Creed, some time before, gradually, I am not sure when.’ While acknowledging ...”

“... This is From Early Life by the oldest of the five authors, the novelist and scientist ‘William Cooper’: he was born in 1910 and brought up (as Harry Hoff) in the town of Crewe in Cheshire. Seniors in his family were determined chapel-goers, but Cooper-Hoff looks back at his childhood, over eighty years, with the quiet smile of a tolerant ...”

“... chivalric ideal in modern society, nor was it to be the last. Already, in 1825, the tall tower of William Beckford’s new baronial hall. Font-hill Abbey, had collapsed without warning. A few years after the Eglinton debacle, one of the day’s leading artists, William Dyce, was commissioned to paint allegorical frescoes on ...”

“... the West was full of enablers and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ingratiating ...”