“... great divergences of opinion, not hard-and-fast orthodoxies, even if the balance of such opinions may have differed as between regions, confessions and social or professional groups. One of the greatest common merits of the two books under review, so different in many respects, is that they emphasise the extent and severity of these disagreements. In this ...”

“... seems so long ago. Zimbabwe has just celebrated the third anniversary of its independence. Comrade Robert Mugabe rules. Ministers have been fired, reinstated, shuffled sideways. The British have made an integrated national army out of the two guerrilla forces and the North Koreans have invited themselves to train a separate praetorian guard. The IMF has been ...”

“... is for cure or oblivion and in the last stanza just about chooses a return to the normality which may have been his undoing in the first place. In ‘Daddy Wants to Murder Me’, the poet-persona revisits his seven-year-old self, I sit in the garden reading Homer, shy lad under a folding one-man tent and daddy                   wants to ...”

“... them was consistent with Frieda having no ‘reluctance ... to occupy the mothering position’ may not, if judgments are called for, be so easily agreed. My own feeling is that among those who care for these matters (and they are not exclusively censorious male oppressors, as here imagined) there is much less animus against Frieda than Jackson chooses to ...”

“... work), was ‘on the brink of a new and potentially more violent revolution’. The 1914 war may initially have postponed such a revolution, but thereafter accelerated it. The idea that tsarist Russia was on the road to a flourishing liberal capitalism, and was diverted only by the war, is a fantasy; as is the post-1991 idealisation of tsarism and its ...”

“... the period’s other radicals: William Thompson, Francis Place, George Petrie, Thomas Spence, Robert Owen and Richard Carlile. In his day, Carlile was no less celebrated as a political agitator, and as a polemical atheist, than he was as a sexual reformer: some such mix of activities was the rule for this group. But it was Carlile’s sexual programme ...”

“... Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm. No one to whom I have begun recounting the story ...”

“... odious than odium theologicum. Can this possibly matter? MacCulloch admits that the Reformation may now seem like the story of two bald men fighting over a comb. But it mattered in Bremen. In the first phase of the Protestant Reformation, this great north German port, and its cathedral, fell into the hands of the Lutherans. When, thirty years later, the ...”

“... upon Foole (1600), a collection of stories about well-known fools compiled by the stage clown Robert Armin, Somer is biddable and universally beloved – admired at court for his willingness to intercede with the king on behalf of the common people (he ‘wisht the king to doe good deeds great store,/Which causde the court to love him more and ...”

“... it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who’s to blame? A conscientious reader may want to go to a number of other books to check out Littell’s account of events, personalities and organisations. The best is the old classic Anatomy of the SS State (1968), written by four members of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich after they had ...”

“... these labels are meant to be ‘helpful for people who are concerned about eating foods that may help keep them healthier longer’. I’m all for that. The label on the tin of cannellini beans tells me that there’s no fat (saturated or unsaturated) in it and no cholesterol. That’s nice, I think. Like everyone else, I’ve heard that eating a lot of ...”

“... Why should cattle be deprived of a calcium supplement? Cement dust, which is an oxide of calcium, may be just the thing: the US Department of Agriculture says a shovelful of cement dust in the trough produces a 30 per cent faster weight gain. There is a problem about delivering all this supercharged supplement to a beast with a digestive tract designed by ...”

“... during ‘cut-backs’ which shelved many FTP projects. When he made the cover of Time Magazine in May 1938 (as Shotover in Heartbreak House), they called him a ‘marvellous boy’. But already the snipers were getting into position. Welles devised the War of the Worlds programme (in one week) partly as a spoof to deflate the impregnable authority of ...”

“... good children were given marzipan fruits while bad ones found their shoes filled with coal; on 1 May, the queenship of the Virgin Mary, bunches of lily of the valley were exchanged. Joan of Arc was one adoptive saint and heroine among many whose memory was kept with incense, flowers, singing and processions on her feast day, another spring festival since it ...”

“... of many waters’. In his remarkable new translation of the Pentateuch, a monument of scholarship, Robert Alter eschews ‘face’ to describe the surface of the world at the start of Genesis, and I miss the cosmic implications, but his first two verses amply compensate with their own originality: ‘When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth ...”