“... rock – or, as Saul Steinberg has it in the old cartoon, pushing a huge, boulder-like question-mark – up a hill. The poems that elicited most controversy were the cycles ‘Landscapes’ and ‘List’. Here’s ‘On the Table’, a poem from the former: The tablecloth stretches Into infinity The ghostly Shadow of a toothpick follows The bloody trail ...”

“... while the chauffeur falls to his knees and makes the sign of the cross. The British Ambassador, Francis Osborne, tried in vain to draw Pacelli’s attention to the plight of the Jews and other civilian populations of Occupied Europe, but Pacelli refused to make any moral distinctions between the belligerents, preferring instead to preach on the proprieties ...”

“... on the period. And, Ives tells us, forget about all the allegations of adultery, with Norris, with Francis Weston, with Anne’s own brother Rochford, with William Brereton, the ultimate fall-guy from Cheshire whose story first drew Ives into a study of the Henrician court, with poor Mark Smeton the musician, the only one to ...”

“... Spanish. The conceit of Facing East from Indian Country that we are looking west to east, at what Francis Jennings entitled The Invasion of America, is the weakest part of what is in many ways a very good book. Stripped of its pretences, this is much less an account of how Indians would have viewed the colonial experience than a synthesis of thirty years of ...”

“... of Republican liberty and thundering critic of autocracy. He was finally hunted down by lackeys of Mark Antony, a member of Rome’s ruling junta and principal victim of Cicero’s dazzling swansong of invective: more than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after Demosthenes’ almost equally nasty attacks on Philip of Macedon, three centuries ...”

“... commercial community – but on none of the attesting documents has he left a signature. He used a mark, vaguely A-shaped, which is interpreted as a pair of glover’s dividers and so perhaps could be called a ‘logo’. The question of illiteracy has been raised, but doesn’t seem plausible. (We have no signatures from Mary either, but her well-penned ...”

“... cause much of a stir, and Reveille doesn’t feature in many official filmographies; but it did mark, in its modest way, the inception of Sinatra’s solo career. He had just left the Tommy Dorsey band, had a slick new press agent called Milton Rubin, and the beginnings of what we would now call a posse. It was a personal turning point for the young man ...”

“... performer, painter and publisher, was so honoured, along with a catalogue of deceased luminaries: Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Isadora Duncan, Dashiell Hammett, Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Kerouac. Via Ferlinghetti, formerly known as Price Row, is a dead-end off Union Street in San Francisco. It was dedicated on 24 April 1994 in a ceremony attended by Michael ...”

“... Flemish surgeon and anatomist Filip Verheyen, a farmer’s son whose precocity seemed to mark him out for a career in the Church. As the narrator (supposedly a student of Verheyen’s) puts it, nicely balancing pious period reflection and modern irony, ‘I am certain that we cannot recognise the fate grooved on the other side of life for us by the ...”

“... In​ a collection of essays published in 2005 to mark four hundred years since the Gunpowder Plot, Antonia Fraser imagined Elizabeth Stuart being crowned as Queen Elizabeth II in January 1606. ‘The Gunpowder Plot Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at Westminster, of abducting his eldest daughter from her governor’s home in Warwickshire ...”

“... For if Spials be lawful against lawful Enemies, much more against Conspirators and Traytors. Francis Bacon, The History of the Reign of Henry VII One of the benefits of the contemporary fascination with the world of intelligence operations is the growing perception that this ‘missing dimension’ which lies behind so many newspaper headlines lies ...”

“... save his own life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it (Mark 8.35). We were given the example of the Full Gospel Central Church in Seoul, where the pastor Paul Yonggi Cho had built up a congregation of 500,000 members, through the exercise of the gifts of the Spirit. My notes for that day are full of numbers: ‘3770 ...”

“... of the enshrined practices of the Athenian and Roman republics by Philip of Macedon and Mark Antony (although those of Demosthenes were calls to arms rather than constitutional critiques).There are at least six books now in print with the words ‘Assault on Truth’ in their titles: Oborne’s; Jeffrey Masson’s polemic against the slipperiness of ...”

“... him – when a letter of his was discovered in 1974, among the papers of Anthony Bacon (brother of Francis) at Lambeth Palace. It was written on 1 August 1593, two months after Marlowe’s death, and it shows Drury was closely involved in these events. He writes: There was a command laid on me lately to stay one Mr Bayns, which did use to resort unto ...”

“... a celebration in the Sistine Chapel on 23 June with the pope and two hundred honoured guests, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the contemporary and modern art collection at the Vatican Museums. I am somehow one of these two hundred; either that, or it is a trap. ‘I think if you’re invited to meet the pope, you go,’ Jason tells me. ‘It will make a ...”