“... 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 ...”

“... favourite then joined up with two courtiers, Endymion Porter (who had been born in Spain) and Sir Francis Cottington, and set sail for France on 19 February. They were thoroughly sick on the voyage. The small party was conspicuous enough to be identified by a group of German tourists outside Paris, so they took the precaution of buying periwigs to thicken ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... University Press and later as an English lecturer at the university itself, Williams made his mark through those he published, those he encouraged and, above all, those he impressed. He struck people as amazing. His energy was famous, his conversation a flood. At OUP, he would march into the office, bound up the stairs and immediately write down the ...”

“... Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 years after it was put up, the Russian Ministry of Culture dismantled and completely refurbished ...”

“... admits, that the Mail’s campaigns against Prince Louis of Battenberg, Richard Haldane and Francis Trippel for supposed German sympathies were disgraceful. His account of the politics of 1914-16 gets too deeply mired in the detail of Northcliffe’s various crusades, interspersed with special pleading, for him to effectively make the point – now ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”