“... Order around 1223 and spent most of his long academic career between Paris and Cologne, where Thomas Aquinas was his star student. Even then, the university was no ivory tower. Faculty had to deal with heresy charges, censorship by overreaching bishops, rivalry between friars and secular masters, and drunken brawls among students – who could matriculate ...”

“... in Argentina. The horrors of the ‘dirty war’ were no secret to inquiring Americans. Professor Thomas Franck, in a chapter headed ‘The Strategic Role of Legal Principles’, argues that Britain rallied the support of many UN states by invoking concepts of law and morality. To disregard the Argentine takeover, these countries were warned, would be ...”

“... these. He was born in 1572 to a strongly Catholic family. His mother was a great-granddaughter of Thomas More’s sister, and it seems that she kept More’s skull among her personal effects until the end of her life. His father was a Catholic and an ironmonger, but it would be wrong to think of him as a merry blacksmith who sold nails by the pound: he was a ...”

“... books, the printer’s name and location could be disguised by the use of a false imprint.For Thomas Keymer in his beautifully detailed history, such strategies of evasion are one of the things that make seditious literary texts worth reading, forms of energetic ‘creativity and rhetorical complexity’ for which, perhaps counterintuitively, we have the ...”

“... Twentieth-century Huxleys have received less biography than one might have expected. Nicholas Murray usefully fills a gap between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws ...”

“... to face the worst. If we read further we find that Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Melville, Thomas Hardy and the author of Ecclesiastes are also members. Edmund Blunden thought The City of Dreadful Night a great anticipation of The Waste Land. If Pope’s Dunciad, Johnson’s ‘London’, Blake’s Songs of Experience and Shelley’s ‘Peter ...”

“... triangular numbers favoured by the Tudors and Elizabethans. When Holbein drew Cecily Heron, Thomas More’s third and youngest daughter, during her first pregnancy in 1527, the fitted bodice of her square-necked gown, loosened to accommodate her bulging stomach, told its own story. (Both Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour were described as ...”

“... much preferred admiranda. Jacobus transmits as reliable truth the information that the infant St Nicholas fasted from the breast on Wednesdays and Fridays, and that milk flowed from St Catherine’s headless body instead of blood. But even he draws the line at St Margaret. In her prison cell, the saint is supposed to have been swallowed alive by the devil in ...”

“... been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years were 1927 (when the ...”

“... that China’s coal burning will peak in the next two years. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Nicholas Stern, who wrote a report on the economics of climate change for the British government in 2007, reckons the world would do well to take China at its word. ‘Smart investors can already see that most fossil fuel reserves are essentially ...”

“... painted water-colours which he then gave, as it they were musical scores, to his composer friend, Thomas von Hartmann, who selected one and, so to speak, played it. Then a third friend, the dancer, Alexander Sacharoff, joined them and improvised a dance to the music, concluding by pointing to that painting which he felt best expressed what he had just ...”

“... In the Cathedral at Christ Church in Oxford, between the recumbent knight with the false nose and the tomb of Saint Frideswide, who eluded her too amorous suitor by hiding among pigs, stands the funerary monument of Robert Burton. Already, it will be noticed, I am giving more information than is strictly necessary. My excuse must be that it is a habit I have caught from Burton himself ...”

“... affects the biographies, a good case in point being provided by that very active Parliament-man, Thomas Norton. Now known to have been one of the Privy Council’s most active managers in the House, he was typed by Neale as a leader of the Puritan opposition. His biographer still reads him in Neale’s way, so that some reasonably transparent official ...”

“... for Protestants to see Jane as the best legitimate heir. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, openly and precisely said that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards. Mary’s remarkable initial success came from single-mindedly stressing the one asset she ...”

“... using free indirect style to drop into their points of view for a paragraph or section. Here are Nicholas Pratt, Kitty Harrow, David Windfall, Johnny Hall (Patrick’s old friend and fellow druggie) and, crowningly, Princess Margaret, who makes a cameo appearance at the party. It is a very funny book, and part of the comedy is cumulative: over the course of ...”