“... forbidding sea towards new land’. Perhaps the strangest thing about Duncan’s dream is that it took him so long to think it strange. Though he’d write, as an adult, that the dream-vision of field and cave remained an ‘emblematic and puzzling’ motivator of his poetry, as a child he wasn’t puzzled at all. His adoptive parents, a public-works ...”

“... The 17th-century antiquary John Selden spent his life deciphering Greek inscriptions and interpreting Near Eastern myths. No scholar of his time had more experience with the historical study of material remains; no one knew better how easily a modern intellectual can read too much into an ancient object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his life reconstructing the techniques with which Italian Renaissance artists analysed and represented the natural world: the science of art, as he once called it ...”

“... one that should be asked only once in the history of literature, then shelved. Sterne pretty well took care of the issue with Tristram Shandy, since when it has become the clunkiest way of expressing the central doubt of human experience. It begins to look like an insult to the intelligence of an audience, who, having, as Potter scoffed in a New Society ...”

“... human speech as how to convey it over a significant distance. That was the task the inventors took on. Jones wisely concentrates on the late 1870s, when, for a brief interval, the history of electronics assumed the dimensions of myth as patents sprang fully armed from the ground while lawsuits circled menacingly in the skies above. The heavyweight ...”

“... the elderly and the sick for transit. The doctor’s submission details many abuses which took place there, including rape and beatings. It also states that the staff at the camp clinic kept records on the patients. Circumventing camp regulations, they used a code to signal that a patient had been mistreated. ‘Several times,’ the submission goes ...”

“... of Trump in 2016. The new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the national security adviser, John Bolton, are believers in US force projection whose appetite for wars can only frustrate Trump’s announced purpose to withdraw from the wars we are already in. The extent to which this president understands so basic a fact about a government he nominally ...”

“... among them. The case against Cecil has recently been revived by Alford’s former supervisor, John Guy, in his biography of Mary, My Heart is my Own (2004). Any subsequent biographer is forced to address Guy’s case against Cecil. Alford has not done so explicitly, but he has accepted some of Guy’s charges, while others are either ignored or treated ...”

“... golden age, and it is certainly a picture which would have been unrecognisable to the bishops who took office in 1559. The 1559 Prayer Book was a little like the Highway Code: it was recognised as a touchstone of orthodoxy, but those who used the confession and absolution set out in the visitation of the sick may have been as rare as those who make hand ...”

“... and so does any theory you construct from it. In Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, John Bossy opens up a startling new angle on certain secret operations of the mid-1580s. If he is right, he has blown an extraordinarily effective cover, which had everyone fooled at the time and has survived intact for four centuries. Some of the links in his ...”

“... At some time in the 1730s Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, wrote down advice on the building of what he called ‘a family house’. This should consist of a central main block and two side pavilions, as a precaution against destruction by fire. ‘The main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him ...”

“... that ‘the dumb go down in history and disappear’ and that ‘the tongueless man gets his land took’, determinedly departs from that silent heritage: for him,                           the job ’s breaking the silence of the worked-out gob (‘gob’ being both mouth and coal-seam). He describes himself as a schoolboy in an ...”

“... he wanted to write a play in reply to it: the wish came too late.But then a different process took over. Beckett’s perspective was wholly desperate, but in the theatre, skilfully played, it had its own entertaining vitality. And this was evidently a game that many could play: black despair, entire self-deception, an inevitable violence waiting in the ...”

“... violence as well as experiencing it. One in five of them saw military service; many more took part in civil defence activities and several fought duels. Like the London clubs which were coming into their own at this time, such behaviour reflected a more self-conscious and assertive masculine style. But this brittle machismo did not express itself in ...”

“... were short-lived and left little lasting impression. When the great antiquary and biographer John Aubrey travelled through the Surrey parishes a few decades later he recorded that it had been the work of the Levellers and their leader John Lilburne. Presumably, that’s what the locals told him. It isn’t clear why ...”

“... of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen Wise addressing an anti-Nazi rally; John Galsworthy’s protest about planes being used for war – ‘For the love of the sun, and stars and the blue sky, that have given us all our aspirations since the beginning of time, let us leave the air to innocence!’ ‘The guiding principle,’ says ...”