“... forging an alliance with Sigismund in 1416 Henry played a central role in the election of Pope Martin V the following year. Vale also brings to light fascinating evidence of a diplomatic mission to central and eastern Europe in May 1421. Confident of victory in France now that his hereditary right to the throne had been recognised by the French king in the ...”

“... mostly those on monastic estates, voiced religious grievances. Only three years had passed since Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, castigated Martin Luther at Worms for his 95 theses and other foundational texts of the Reformation. Although Luther shrank back to a more conservative position, his doctrine of the priesthood ...”

“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”

“... efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to ...”

“... The anthology represents him by the section of ‘Little Gidding’ in which the spirits of Charles I and Milton are jointly invoked. The political tone here is relatively conciliatory, all the more so in the final text from which the poet dropped those conservative martyrs Richard III and the Duke of Wellington. Paulin has described Geoffrey Hill as ...”

“... about the early days of Motley. They had taken as a studio Chippendale’s old workshop behind St Martin’s Lane, where a gang of actors, led by Gielgud, could generally be found sitting around, gossiping, discussing productions and having tea. With a tea bill that sometimes came to £100 a week, it sounds cosy, cliquey and not the stuff of theatrical ...”

“... the power to communicate feeling). Early in the 19th century, François Magendie in France and Charles Bell in Britain established the sensory/motor division of the spinal roots as fundamental to nervous organisation. Experimenters sliced and snipped, but they also looked to philosophy, their theory of the ‘reflex arc’ being suggested by the Cartesian ...”

“... an art of political slander, as Robert Darnton terms it, and in many places something like what Charles Walton calls a ‘culture of calumny’. But in what ways are they particular to a time and place? How different, for example, are the charges of lesbianism and Machiavellian manoeuvring levelled against Hillary Clinton from those published two centuries ...”

“... liaison in a sort of perverse fashion,’ he claims. One letter he writes in the persona of ‘Charles Bovary’. ‘What does your name stand for, Dick?’ he writes in another, with the sign-off, ‘Here is mine.’ The letters might make an interesting art piece, he proposes – ‘a Calle Art piece. You know, like Sophie Calle?’ They could paste the ...”

“... policy and, late in his life, through the crises of political and religious authority under Charles I, a period which Donaldson and the edition portray as one of neglected literary achievement on Jonson’s part. Yet adjustments to complex circumstances may be compatible with continuities of personal direction. Donaldson, employing an adjective that has ...”

“... containing the relics of St Theresa of Lisieux. A hundred years ago the Carmelite nun Thérèse Martin died, and she died, according to a woman I spoke to at the end of the queue, ‘with a heart as big as the world itself’. The last words of St Theresa are not open to doubt. ‘I am not dying,’ she said. ‘I am entering into Life.’ She was canonised ...”

“... mobilising in pursuit of their rights, legitimately claimed. The movement’s success owed much to Martin Luther King’s strategy of non-violence, but it also had to do with the co-ordination between a ‘primary’ mass mobilisation of citizens and a skilful activist leadership, who could channel popular energy into sustained and effective campaigns, and ...”

“... we had.’ Indeed, on his account, everyone was heroic: David Trimble, Ian Paisley, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Bertie Ahern, John Hume, even Seamus Mallon and Mark Durkan of the SDLP and David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party. This also seems too good to be true. Was this really the golden age of Irish politics, akin to the United States in ...”

“... violon d’Ingres types like D.H. Lawrence, Arnold Schoenberg, Winston Churchill and Prince Charles – talented amateur painters, possibly, but not exactly what you would call marginal or psychically alienated figures. Euphemistic, in turn, because once again the sheer intransigence of outsider art – its blankness, nihilism, incommunicativeness, what ...”

“... to be made because the only books we have so far – Meredith’s The past is another country and Martin and Johnson’s The Struggle for Zimbabwe – both have major weaknesses. Thirdly, it is impossible to overlook those occasions when this cool, intelligent tale lurches into the snide or the hysterical or the plain silly. For instance, Caute’s opinion of ...”