“... of Alberti has been of a humanist, a virtuoso in the taxing art of writing Ciceronian Latin, who drew on rhetoric to devise an original theory of painting, on which no classical treatises had survived. Even his interests in perspective, painting, building and architectural proportion have been seen as more those of a scholar than of a practical man. But ...”

“... Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ‘British’ in the subtitle of the book as an indication of defensive ...”

“... and golfe be utterly cryed down’, while Henry VIII made football a penal offence. Under Elizabeth I, the Grand Jury of Middlesex held that it was ‘an unlawful game, a great affray likely to result in homicides and serious accidents’, while the Puritans outlawed ‘football playing and other develishe pastimes’. This, in turn, led Charles II to ...”

“... broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently meaning it would attract some musician ...”

“... man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s world the dingy agents of the KGB and MI6 are interchangeable. Who can forget A.J.P. Taylor’s jibe that no spy ever told his masters anything of value they could not have gleaned from the press? Or Malcolm Muggeridge’s chronicles ...”

“... needed a Latin crib to help them through Greek poetry in this period. Ben Jonson, who famously drew attention to Shakespeare’s ‘small Latine, and lesse Greeke’, probably got most of what he knew of Homer from an anthology of Greek verse which had a Latin translation facing each page. The only English language verse translation of Homer before 1598 ...”

“... were the suggestive descriptions applied to buildings that obeyed no strict stylistic rules but drew intelligently on history and modest vernacular buildings, adopting the tile-hanging, red brick and half-timbering, the large chimney stacks and little leaded lights of the past and turning them into something new and comfortable. These houses, with their ...”

“... and social-services groups, as well as longtime residents, many of them disabled and elderly. Mary Elizabeth Phillips, who arrived in San Francisco after getting married in 1937, will be 98 when she is driven out of her home of more than half a century. In many other places eviction means you go and find a comparable place to live: in San Francisco that’s ...”

“... stories. She examined the petty cruelties, as well as the racism and anti-Semitism, that drew these communities shut. In one, a woman called Adela Strangeworth, ‘a name honoured in the town for so many years’, mails letters to each of her neighbours spreading gossip. ‘Have you found out yet what they were all laughing about after you left the ...”

“... birds related to a treatise of 1561, ‘The epitome of the treasure of health’, which drew on the work of the 15th-century alchemists Thomas Norton and George Ripley, who in turn were indebted to the formulations of Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Majorcan polymath. The key to alchemy was deep reading, between texts and across the ages. Keynes’s ...”

“... woman, stood by Oscar with her husband with great determination, but, as this scene suggests, she drew the line at being high-minded about him. Max was unimpressed too, although his common sense is not coldheartedness. He stood by Oscar, but he was not deceived about him. He saw that success had made him arrogant: ‘gross not in body only – he did become ...”

“... Paracelsus, Agrippa, Dee, Bruno, all of them contributors to Marlowe’s conception of Faustus – drew freely from all these sources. Mebane also studies the interaction of occultism with other philosophical trends in the Renaissance: its relations with Humanism, and its involvement in the emergence of ‘genuine science’. He concludes that Renaissance ...”

“... of the confessors who accompanied most living saints and acted as witnesses and praise-singers. Elizabeth of Hungary, a historical figure who was canonised four years after her death in 1231 by her friend Pope Gregory IX, was written up by the poet Rutebeuf among others: although she was married (the exception among exemplary women), she also turned her ...”

“... has always been an object of avid attention. ‘My mother captivated by her looks alone, yet what drew most men and women into her orbit at first meeting was her talk.’ About her father Bedford is less secretive and some of the ground covered in A Legacy is rehearsed again here. He, too, had been good-looking (in this novel few people are plain) and was ...”

“... Britain and on the Continent with a succession of séances, two or three of which were attended by Elizabeth and Robert Browning. On the first occasion, an unseen hand lowered a clematis wreath (laurel was hard to come by) on Elizabeth’s brow. She believed in spiritual manifestations, but Robert, though he shared her ...”