“... to his office. The only thing she could think of to say was: ‘I was not available.’ He took this as an admission she was having an affair and ‘positively beamed’ at her. She’s sure he’d have sacked her if she’d told him the truth. Afterwards, she felt the whips were looking at her ‘with new and comradely approval’. She wasn’t used ...”

“... The lines were later produced in court as evidence against her. The following day the police took her to the villa to quiz her on site. They gave her protective boots and gloves to wear; ‘Ta-dah,’ she sang when she put them on. This came up in court too, as proof she wasn’t taking the murder seriously. Knox says she merely ‘wanted to be friendly ...”

“... was in Paris as minister of munitions).As battle raged in the last week of July, Channon took himself off to the Normandy coast, where he was amused to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was ...”

“... Neo-Latin odes of Casimir Sarbiewski, ‘the Polish Horace’.) University friends who married and took provincial livings sought to re-create a schooly companionship by exchanging odes. In reading these verses you are meant to fondle their metrical smoothness, smile wisely at an appropriate allusion to Virgil, smirk at a double entendre, or burst into ...”

“... by the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, the only African country to withstand the Scramble, the term took on a powerful political dimension. Ethiopian movements played a part in such political insurgency as the Bambata rebellion of 1906 and John Chilembwe’s Nyasaland rising of 1915. Meanwhile, intellectuals like Blyden and ...”

“... principles were more influential than his practice. Although his short memoir of his friend John Sterling is counted as a minor classic of biography, his much more elaborate life of Cromwell, not to say his interminable History of Frederick the Great, has never been shortlisted among the world’s greatest examples of the art. But Carlyle possessed one ...”

“... from the support given it by Levellers and sectaries. The Parliamentary gentry of the 1650s took a savage view of the Quakers, one of the groups which favoured Jewish readmission. MPs are unlikely to have been reassured by the activities of Thomas Tany, ‘Theaureau John’. Informed by nocturnal revelations that God ...”

“... to quite well-known cases, such as that of Marthe Brossier in France, and the activities of John Darrel in England. Economically written, with telling quotations and a good deal of quiet humour, these must have been entertaining and instructive lectures; readers should not undervalue Unclean Spirits on account of its lightness of touch, still less its ...”

“... this man go, you are no friend to Caesar; any man who claims to be king is defying Caesar” ’ (John 19.7). Since the 18th century, however, it has been argued that this allegation of a ‘frame-up’ is itself a frame-up – whose victims are the Jews. If Jesus, as many Gospel passages indicate, did indeed claim to be ‘King of the Jews’, is it possible ...”

“... In works with titles such as The Occult Philosophy, wise men and magi like Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee outlined in general and axiomatic form the elements of a high and secret knowledge which they claimed to have inherited from the past. This is exactly what O’Keefe has accomplished for his own misty past, instead of Orpheus, Hermes and Simon Magus, we ...”

“... back pages are going to be well-thumbed. ‘Hi, Craig,’ see page 752, you ‘mad sod’; ‘Hi, John,’ see page 563, you ‘arse-faced trendy’; ‘Hi, David,’ see page 266, you ‘deaf cunt’, and so on. Less succinct salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie (‘droning out his tosh’), Ted Hughes (‘boring old monolith, no good ...”

“... This went badly awry. ‘If a noble family cannot rebuild their own castle,’ thundered John Ruskin, ‘in God’s name let them live in the nearest ditch till they can.’ The popular view that stately homes were part of the national heritage was now challenged by the Radical view that they were the national heritage, wrongly appropriated. With an ...”

“... situation now is very different. At the age of 78, and with the possible exception of John Adams, Glass can be regarded as the most famous – certainly the most successful – of all the composers who emerged from the minimalist revolution of the 1960s. Perhaps because he shed the technical apparatus of such iconic pieces as Reich’s Drumming ...”

“... Beneath their plain and practical exteriors, Secord suggests, the new scientific bestsellers took on some of the roles of fiction and advice literature, creating a new class of self-fashioning consumers and orienting them in a rapidly changing world. Just as the Reform Act was regarded by some campaigners as a historic victory and by others as a shameful ...”

“... debris. T.C. Boyle is part East Coast acerbic, part Californian flower-guru. In youth, he took the Burroughs-tour from a childhood in the ‘vestigial woods of suburban Westchester’, through fixations on Huxley, Orwell, Salinger and Kerouac, into drop-out drug addiction and subsequently dragged himself out of smack-bohemia, settling into a PhD in ...”