“... the members of the Commons seem at first sight to be a motley crew. Thus Geoffrey Chaucer and Richard Whittington, for us the two most celebrated individuals recorded in these pages, are now remembered for totally different reasons. They were at least alike in attending only one Parliament, Chaucer as knight of the shire for Kent in 1386 and Whittington ...”

“... medium that it should precipitate this particular dual sense. The greatness of Gielgud’s Richard II is not a simultaneous sense of an off-stage Gielgud and an on-stage Richard, but the transparency or dissolving of the particular actor’s fringe contingencies, even if an impersonal actedness remains part of the ...”

“... survival, perhaps doomed to be bred out in the long run as savages became civilised, rather like Richard Dawkins’s view of the religion meme? Is that the implication? If so, this is precisely the opposite of the Christian view, especially in the Middle Ages, that shedding tears was the sign of an advanced soul, one which had been pierced by God. This ...”

“... unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses. Disney and Kroc were great admirers of Ford (as was Lenin) and saw assembly lines as the embodiment of efficiency, order and consistency. These lines ...”

“... of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle, which was stamped onto the coins issued by the first king of Prussia; the phrase was also used as the title of a Bach cantata of 1715. As MacGregor points out, the motto with its varying uses raises the central question of modern German history: how could such a noble ideal be perverted? The exhibition doesn’t ...”

“... lectures sprang from texts. The first was two sentences in a letter from Mme de Maintenon: ‘The King takes all my time. The rest I give to St Cyr [a foundation]; would that it were all.’ Derrida took off on ‘the difficulty of giving more than all’, especially of a non-commodity, a ‘nothing’ like time. One’s mental hair rose at this ...”

“... no higher tribute to the late Prince Consort than by dedicating the first several Idylls of the King to his memory as ‘Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight’. Between them, the two Tennysons illustrated two major aspects of the chivalric obsession. Fancy expanded into pretentiousness which then lapsed into ...”

“... acting for the Vatican. Besides being the lover of Siegfried Sassoon, Hessen was also the king of Italy’s son-in-law and fluent in Italian. He had lived in Italy for some years and was exceptionally well connected. As soon as Pacelli was elected pope, Hitler, wishing to avoid any repetition of Pius XI’s criticisms, asked Hessen to see if he could ...”

“... for the requisite extractions) on her 21st birthday, or the occasion of her first marriage. As Richard Barnett points out in his excellent text for The Smile Stealers, it wasn’t uncommon up until the late 1930s for young women to receive just such a benison – the reification, if you like, of the great relief to be obtained once those nerve-infested ...”

“... War begun and world war on the horizon, the distinguished Scottish scholar and editor of Donne, H.J.C. Grierson, gave a series of lectures on Milton and Wordsworth, which began by addressing the attacks on Milton that T.S. Eliot and his acolytes were mounting. The revival of interest in metaphysical poetry, which Grierson had done so much to stimulate, had ...”

“... he had taken the first step on the road to the highest secular office in England under the King’s, and to a death in 1535 which resounded throughout Catholic Europe far more loudly than would Erasmus’s a year later. Even More’s death Erasmus helped to further fame, with another celebrated letter. Erasmus’s More, at a year or two over forty, is ...”

“... burdensome. Marital status, so useful for reputation management, brought few other benefits. Richard Cosway refused to allow Maria to practise professionally; Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun was only too keen for his wife to sell her work so that he could pocket the proceeds; and whatever happened in Kauffman’s brief first marriage was so upsetting that ...”

“... protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him. Cromwell first tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to ...”

“... by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also ...”

“... and translations of the Book of Psalms, the original book of Dave – supposedly written by King David, the Neim Z’mirot Yisrael (‘the sweet singer of Israel’) – ‘substantially shaped the culture of 16th and 17th-century England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as singing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic ...”