“... accounts of his life. Early Protestant accounts were more conflicted. In his ‘Book of Martyrs’ John Foxe was torn between describing More the humanist poet and More the lord chancellor who brought godly reformers to trial; in the end the persecutor won out. Saint or sinner, scholar or polemicist, philosopher or politician – no single vision of More has ...”

“... it wasn’t under state control. It was a long time – more than two hundred years – before it took up anything like the role allocated to most central banks today: fine-tuning monetary policy to guarantee some balance in the national economy between price stability and employment. The bank was instrumental in the rise of the modern British state and its ...”

“... and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of Gravelines two days before, there were still great bodies of disciplined Spanish ...”

“... moments in the history of American airtime. Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore ...”

“... Sally’) and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most notorious radio traitor of all, and many British people, in the charged atmosphere of the postwar months, seemed ...”

“... fare. It was true that Don Juan was little understood ‘just now’. His once loyal publisher, John Murray, had backed out after the first five cantos, and the leading periodicals of the time refused on principle to review any of its instalments. (‘We knew not any severity of criticism which could reach the faults or purify the taste of Don Juan,’ the ...”

“... disguise an essential seediness. It is noted by his first biographer, William Cooke, that he ‘took snuff in such quantities as often rendered him a very slovenly beau’. Variously called the ‘Hogarth of the stage’ and the ‘English Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad ...”

“... peglegs: all press-ganged upstream with Adam Dalgleish’s impersonator, Roy Marsden, for the Long John Silver show at the Mermaid. James is left with a heritage trail of selective quotations, a London Dungeon of waxwork crimes exhibited in authentic locations. This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture (where even Mandy the Temp, in her ...”

“... poem associated with Rochester, ‘Upon Nothing’. One is written in the hand of his steward, John Cary, the other in a scribal hand. The second has been meticulously corrected from the first by Lady Rochester, who does not however correct the ascription of three stanzas of the poem to ‘Dux Bucks’ and three more to ‘Fleetwood Shepherd’. Harold ...”

“... and intellectuals, including Stalin, Einstein, Henry Ford, Mussolini, Fritz Kreisler, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France, H.G. Wells, the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject of countless ...”

“... Mark Micale’s book opens with a scene from John Huston’s film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), which re-creates one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s legendary demonstrations of hypnosis before an audience of doctors at the Salpêtrière. With magical ease, Charcot makes two patients’ hysterical symptoms disappear ...”

“... Vague – reviewed Kapò, a film by Gillo Pontecorvo about the concentration camps. Rivette took exception to a tracking shot in the film, showing a woman who had killed herself. For him, the intrusive camera movement was a serious moral trespass: ‘The man who decides at this moment to track forward and reframe the dead body in a low-angle shot ...”

“... English aristocracy has always been hard to draw, and perhaps never more so than in the case of John Charles Wallop, third Earl of Portsmouth. Born in 1767 at the family’s Hampshire residence of Hurstbourne Park, Wallop grew into a child who betrayed signs of being what his contemporaries would have called a simpleton. He was sent to be tutored by the ...”

“... But parties did quickly emerge, producing strange electoral results. The electors in 1796 chose John Adams, a leading Federalist, for president. Jefferson, his Republican rival, came second, becoming vice president. Four years later, when Jefferson again sought the presidency, Burr became his running mate. A few Republican electors were supposed to cast ...”

“... might use his wife solely to beget legitimate heirs, otherwise ignoring or abusing her while he took mistresses at will. The struggle for free marital choice, exempt from parental meddling, still furnished Restoration dramatists and 19th-century novelists with plots. Within this harsh picture, Burger maintains, conduct books brightened the moral prospects ...”