“... Montaigne, Thomas Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe ...”

“... in the coastal village of Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking ...”

“... Rego sat at the back of the class and painted from her imagination. ‘Of course one becomes very self-conscious at art school,’ she told her son hesitantly during an interview in 2016, ‘being a day-girl, not being an intellectual, the restricted way of teaching in those days – the Euston Road method, which I could not do. You lose your – it’s not ...”

“... Suffering from crippling pains in the head and advancing paranoia, he conceived a vendetta against Robert Peel, then prime minister, bought pistols, travelled to London and, though apparently intending to assassinate Peel, fatally shot his private secretary Edward Drummond. ‘The Tories in my native city have compelled me to do this,’ he claimed in ...”

“... St Guinefort, patron saint for the protection of children. Many sainted characters dream of bliss: Robert Browne, an 18th-century astronomer, of the young Jesus getting into bed with him; St Catherine of Siena of marrying Jesus, who gives her his foreskin for a ring (the lack of self-awareness among our pre-Freudian ...”

“... York Times and the Washington Post are magnificent, if lonely achievements, they are also prone to self-importance and full of acres of leaden prose – the deliberately dull reportage of ethical journalism. In that context someone like Hitchens shines forth like a naughty deed on a grey day. Hitchens appears to best advantage in Prepared for the worst, a ...”

“... and how the failings of Italy’s transport infrastructure encouraged the creation of more self-sufficient steel mini-mills. Britain’s relative decline has been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of books. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the analysis here is often both familiar and at first glance deeply depressing. The examples cited of ...”

“... is Pierre Berton in The Arctic Grail. Berton accepts the challenge with a boldness worthy of a Robert M’Clure or a James Clark Ross. Not only does he tell the story of the Franklin Expedition and the search for it, he tells the story of all Arctic exploration in the 19th century in three overlapping stages: the search for the Northwest Passage, the ...”

“... is too highbrow. Instead of Germaine Greer, there is Navratilova. When a poet does scrape in, like Robert Frost, all one needs to know is that he was famous, not why. Success matters more than states of the soul; the successsful are the pagan gods of ordinary life. The reader is judged to need ‘real’ facts, the kind Mrs Thatcher wants schoolchildren to be ...”

“... able to explain the gradual mutation of the expectant city of the mid-Seventies into the mediocre, self-conscious city of the end of the decade.’ This is a complaint often made about Barcelona: as long as Franco was alive, it was a centre of resistance, radical, cosmopolitan, connected to Europe when the rest of Spain was not. When Franco died, in ...”

“... finance: namely, that the monarch became a taxpayer. In 1842, the then Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, reintroduced income tax, which had previously been levied on a temporary basis during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Queen was determined – or advised, the documentation is incomplete – that ‘her own income should be subject to a ...”

“... clearly she could. When he writes ‘this far’, I am dead sure that ‘this’ is not an adverb. Self-contradictorily, however, he seems to believe that a word cannot be an adverb unless it ends in -ly. There seems no other reason for him to write ‘overly’, a North American usage I always find overly ripe. Stylistically, he is at his most infuriating ...”

“... Malcolm Yorke says more about ‘excesses of amorous nature’ than friends and disciples do (like Robert Speaight, whose biography came out in 1966), in whose hands his reputation has largely rested. The very presence of a woman was a temptation and incitement: he had Ayatollah-like ideas about women’s clothing – perhaps a reflection of his ...”

“... dissection of their arguments, his unsparing determination to catch them out, as he often does, in self-contradiction, grants their thinking more respectful attention than it deserves. On the evidence amassed here, Woolf’s own dismissive contempt – ‘I cant conceive how anybody can be fool enough to believe in a doctor,’ she wrote to Violet Dickinson in ...”

“... seeking to identify the influences that shaped a body of literature come equipped with a self-destruct mechanism in the form of two beguiling but potentially compromising accomplices, the companion fallacies of post hoc ergo propter hoc and the single cause. It may be merely a coincidence, after all, that it was only after the dissemination of ...”