“... that in the Garden of Eden ‘the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made’ (Genesis 3:1). During this first biblical stage of its career, the serpent was apparently less slithery than in later years, but it was already primed to lead Adam and Eve astray with lasting consequences for human sinfulness. Jews and ...”

“... disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes disco as ‘a dance fad of the ...”

“... answer may prove the seminal feature of his book. He finds it in the north Oxfordshire home of Lord Falkland during the 1630s, where there met, as Aubrey said, ‘all the excellent of that peacable time’. The Great Tew circle can be studied from more than one angle. It can be seen as a literary group, a ...”

“... it – a faded provincial distance – is therefore relevant. But this is a story of ‘coming home’ in a more inward sense. In the course of the book the all-male and all-female drinking-bouts that pass for ‘social life’ evolve to something closer to simple human loving-kindness, where human beings actually talk to each other. The relationship of ...”

“... is the expectation – widespread in the late 19th century as well as in the trenches and on the Home Front – that the dead would regularly appear among the living. ‘Traditionally’, the dead were meant to remain dead. Ghosts appeared occasionally, but usually uninvited and unwelcomed. Their purpose in returning was generally to complain, to warn, to ...”

“... York producer sends me Waiting in the Wings, Noël Coward’s play about a theatrical retirement home – Denville Hall, I suppose it is. He wants me to update it, though lest I should think this kind of thing beneath me what he says he wants is ‘a new perspective on the play’.The perspective will have to be a pretty distant one as it now seems a ...”

“... of battle’; soldiers’ deathbed letters from the front must have shaped mourning back home. Having a model of a ‘good death’ may well have made it possible for some soldiers to die more at peace than might otherwise have been the case. It is also possible that years of carnage might have weakened the power of faith to soften the terror of ...”

“... from the Palestinian Mandate, thereby greatly diminishing the area of ‘the Jewish National Home’; many Arabs in Palestine crowded into the Jewish settled areas, and therefore when they left they were not genuine refugees; the Jews did not displace the Arabs, it was the other way round; anyway, the Palestinian refugees were not driven out in ...”

“... adult, in middle life crippled and often in pain). Johnson tells how, all his life, not only at home but in the houses of his increasingly grand friends, Pope would call for the day-long and even night-long ministrations of coffee-bringers and other helps, the more willing for being charmingly thanked and very well paid. In other portraits, Pope chose ...”

“... breakdown. In universe one, the NHS will be upturned to give most of the healthcare people need at home or on their doorstep and admit to the big hospitals only patients with major trauma, or suffering diseases that demand intensive care, or complex surgical or biochemical expertise. Big hospitals are to become centres of research, high technology, rare skills ...”

“... founded Liberia on similar principles, Freetown had become the ‘Athens of West Africa’, home to the first university conceived on the European model in the region, and to a cosmopolitan population of free blacks from around the Atlantic. I had come to Freetown to research the black loyalists. Their improbable journey from American slavery to African ...”

“... Suppression of Street Noises. Dickens complained to Parliament on behalf of all whining, stay-at-home writers about ‘the frightful noises in despite of which your correspondents have to gain their bread’, and doubtless also gained as little sympathy as I do (so get a proper job like everyone else); and Carlyle (as I did) built himself a soundproofed ...”

“... separation in death was the story of her life, as for so many military wives: she has stayed at home in the Wye Valley, entombed at Marshal’s pious foundation of Tintern Abbey. The most important of these firsts was a book, without which Thomas Asbridge would struggle to sustain his sprightly narrative: the History of William Marshal is the first life ...”

“... irreparably’. A miscarriage leaves her ‘flooded with relief … exultant and grateful’. M.G. Lord believes she can ‘white-knuckle’ her partner’s ‘unilateral’ decision to adopt a baby, somewhat unrealistically picturing herself ‘not so much as a co-parent but as a benign auntie’ who will take care of her lover (not the infant). When the ...”

“... one thousand cartloads’, according to John Stow – before the carters could be paid and sent home. Afterwards, the area was covered over with ‘soylage of the citie’ … [T]he carts were filled with human remains … [which] had been lodged in the great ossuary of the cathedral … located under the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin. Mullaney asks us to ...”