“... that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, was imprisoned in the Tower by Richard III he was fed by a cat which brought him a dead pigeon. In Wolf Hall this piece of family mythology becomes a tale that Sir Henry, on the edge of retirement, relates himself, with a rheumy twinkle of unreliability in his eye. A factually implausible ...”

“... 1. The concept of sovereignty may refer to the political control that a leader exercises over a society and territory, or the psychic control that an individual exercises over herself. 2. Sovereignty has a long history in political thought, not least in relation to the expansion of European imperial powers. But it was in Spanish America that its modern form – applied to non-imperial or non-colonial nation states – was first put into effective use as a diplomatic norm ...”

“... by HarperCollins. Eve’s irritating editor, Amanda Farley-Brown, is crossing her fingers that Richard and Judy will feature a Genuine. But Eve is blocked, unable to begin work on the next book, and has decamped to a holiday house in Norfolk for a change of scene and to get away from dead people’s relations, taking her husband and two children with ...”

“... by the Palestrina Choir in Dublin between 1898 and 1901. It also informed the revivalist work of Richard Runciman Terry after he became responsible for music at Westminster Cathedral in 1901. Terry clearly agreed with Bordes when he wrote that ‘modern individualistic music, with its realism and emotionalism, may stir ...”

“... superficially gendered: ‘The Ilias he made for the men, and the Odysseïs for the other sex,’ Richard Bentley declared in 1713. Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) is the apotheosis of the idea (later picked up by Robert Graves) that the Odyssey is too charming to have been written by a man, and that, moreover, no man would make a heroic ...”

“... to the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade. ‘Fatima’s Poem’ is addressed to Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), and was inspired by a visit to Penrhyn Castle, one of eleven National Trust houses involved in the project. Pennant’s family owned four sugar plantations in Jamaica and he used some of the profits to develop the ...”

“... On​ 13 May 1397, the visitors came to Ruardean in Gloucestershire. They learned that Nicholas Cuthler was causing a scandal among his neighbours. He had not come to terms with his father’s death and was making strange claims: he went about in public saying that his father’s spirit still walked the village at night ...”

“... the narrator, Eily, gets so anxious giving a blowjob that she makes her actor-boyfriend recite Richard III to get her through it:Nowisthewinterofourdiscontentmadeglorioussummerbythissonofyork and allthecloudsthatloured upon our house inthedeepbosomofthe ocean     burrrrieeeed nowareourbrowsboundwithvictoriouswreaths …Characters use their bodies to get ...”

“... secret agent. Al-Shiraa, the Lebanese magazine that leaked word of the arms supply on 1 November, may well have been enlisted by his political enemies in order to cripple his chances of greater prominence. There are at least two precedents for such American expeditions to Iran, both of them interventionary in the most literal sense. One was the notorious ...”

“... are, in Hardy’s phrase, ‘selves unseeing’. Setting the poem eighty years after Schubert, Richard Strauss overrode these delicacies of sentiment in favour of an outpouring of ecstatic love (the young man’s), pulsing with sensuality and the rush of the blood. His setting – Fragonard to Schubert’s Watteau – scaled up the expressive range to the ...”

“... parents, Cynthia Curzon and Oswald Mosley, were married in the Chapel Royal, St James’s on 11 May 1920: ‘Cimmie’s wedding dress had a design of green leaves in it, in defiance of a superstition that green at a wedding was unlucky: there was also a superstition that it was unlucky to be married in May. Cimmie herself ...”

“... the human attempt to represent it wanting. And Malick would not exempt his own attempt: his images may be more realistic than the painter’s billboard, but he invites us to wonder whether they’re really so different from it, to note how his images too are dwarfed and decentred when set against the real thing. Visually as well as verbally Malick is an ...”

“... without emotion. This feeling, while it shall endure, and pervade the bulk of our population, may be held as a proof that loyalty, and the love of justice, and hatred of oppression, are among our permanent national characteristics. So wrote one of Sir Walter Scott’s anonymous competitors in the preface to The Court of Holyrood: Fragments of an Old ...”

“... conclusions which so filled him with fright that he preferred to lock them away in his heart. He may (or he may not) have surmised that in the last analysis he aimed at something beyond the pale of Christianity; that, thought to the end, his true design was once for all to wreck the wall of fixed causes with their dogmas ...”

“... In fact, some of the best-known roles for castrati were the alpha males Alexander the Great, Richard I, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Boys were castrated to make them better and stronger singers, not to make them girls. On the other hand, while living in the house of a Russian prince the castrato Balatri ‘gained unheard of access to the sexually ...”