“... Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary, ‘He is the most wonderful man I have known,’ then added more equivocally: ‘unique in this, that he had no thought for anything or person, including himself, but only for the work he had in hand.’ This handsome new edition of Morris’s letters does not entirely answer our natural question of how a man so often ...”

“... radical chic would have been much the same as his, but we might have the impression that it was a more settled part of her life-style and her way of facing society. Both made considerable social efforts, anxious to charm, particularly prospective employers and men in the media. Signs of strain in the marriage? Rather conspicuously absent, except for young ...”

“... the saints in Latin in tenth-century Saxony? Hrotsvit hopes that ‘the Giver of my talent all the more be justly praised through me, the more limited the female intellect is believed to be.’ No doubt the self-deprecation is mostly literary convention, but it feels a long way from crushing flint with teeth. And what do ...”

“... up in six years 3266 devotees of thuggee, hanged 412 and imprisoned or transported hundreds more, extinguishing a centuries-old cult. The method of this religious fraternity had been to ingratiate themselves with travellers, strangle them suddenly with a scarf, then rob and bury them. By contrast, the English highwayman behaved, or tried to behave, like ...”

“... anti-immigrant Know-Nothings of the 1850s, white supremacist politicians of the Jim Crow era, and more recent hucksters and demagogues including Joe McCarthy and George Wallace. Not to mention more respectable types such as Richard Nixon, whose ‘Southern strategy’ offered a blueprint for mobilising white resentment over ...”

“... great length, only a year later. De Morgan lived to be 88 and wrote seven novels, as well as two more which were completed by another hand and published posthumously. They were mostly long books, and the first four came out at annual intervals, for de Morgan seems to have found fiction very easy after all that arduous tiling. He was writing at a time when ...”

“... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...”

“... drinking itself to death. The ‘Roberts’ (Colquhoun and MacBryde) were there beside him; Dylan Thomas was boozing in the same pubs. Art is not made in that spirit any more. The notion that all things are a gamble, that candles should be burnt at both ends, that poverty is often art’s handmaid and scrounging talent’s ...”

“... of marriage, than a holy institution of God’. William Gouge, a London minister, was a little more relaxed: in 1622 he allowed ‘all those lawful customs that are used for the setting forth of the outward solemnity thereof, as meeting of friends, accompanying the bridegroom and bride both to and from the church, putting on best apparel, feasting, with ...”

“... on’ they will not be held accountable for their actions. Chickens do not come home to roost any more. Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire campaigners against NIREX’s attempts to test, as suitable for nuclear waste disposal, the clay of Killingholme and Fulbeck have invoked the precedent of Crichel Down, an area taken over by government during World War ...”

“... against Euro-madness, when ‘Brussels’ issued specifications (at least 5½ inches long, no more than 1.1 inches thick). In the Caribbean, where bananas are the staple crop of several islands, the fruit isn’t so funny and banana jokes are wry. In the Fifties, in the Dutch, French and British islands, the end of the imperial era was marked by a ...”

“... came in the cinema. He was enchanted by Leslie Howard in Korda’s Scarlet Pimpernel and even more by Vivien Leigh in The Hamilton Woman, which begins with the elderly, raddled Emma looking into the camera as the picture dissolves and we see her young again ‘in all her beauty, running through the splendours of the palace in Naples’. It was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... As Roper demonstrates in her absorbing account of the Peasants’ War, this outburst was more than a historical curiosity. The rebellion was an expression of a novel political sensibility and has informed every major European insurrection since; it can’t be understood without considering the rebels’ inner lives as well as their material ...”

“... for their children, but were discriminating about what they were offered: preferring to pay at more old-fashioned local establishments when the new free schemes seemed too regimented or ideological. This, it seems to me, was good history. It came up with a novel but plausible insight about our ancestors. Laqueur’s argument may not stand the test of ...”