“... answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent ...”

“... the reformer Granville Sharp prosecuted a man named Stapylton who had taken his runaway slave, Thomas Lewis, forcibly on board ship. The trial judge, Lord Mansfield, tried to evade the moral issue by directing the jury that the case depended simply on whether Lewis was Stapylton’s property. The jury returned a verdict that Lewis was not, but Mansfield ...”

“... as he sometimes does. But Gifford tells us that Edward VII had tattoos, as did George V, as did Nicholas II of Russia and Alphonso XII of Spain, not to speak of Lady Randolph Churchill. Slote, Mamigonian and Turner add that Edward VII ‘received his first tattoo in 1862’, and then give us a source for this, as they generally do. But they don’t always ...”

“... another masterpiece, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. It obsessively yet exquisitely recounts Nicholas Crabbe’s martyrdom, which is also his own: Crabbe is yet another failed priest whose ‘ruthless immitigable faith’ both sustains him in and perpetuates his isolation and eventual death. ‘Immitigable’ – this and many other weird neologisms ...”

“... Once again their ages aren’t specified, though eventually Roland is revealed as the youngest and Nicholas must be the oldest since their mother singles him out for scolding. David and Helen are in the middle, one way or the other – these are the only siblings in human history for whom birth order has no significance. If Garner, an only child ...”

“... of breaststroking on a kindly thermal above the lesser towers and steeples of London, like St Nicholas of Bari in the quattrocento painting by Bicci di Lorenzo in the Ashmolean. But the fantasy doesn’t quite play. The integrity of the view is broken by squared columns and the metal frames of window panels, turning the spread of the city below into a ...”

“... she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas. If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s ...”

“... cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment of the City. A benevolent and paternalistic employer was lost, along with the heady drench of hops from the brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the ...”

“... have been involved in simultaneously writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, then beginning Nicholas Nickleby nine months before Oliver Twist was finished as relentless monthly serialisation schedules obliged him to meet deadline after deadline. By the time the tenth and last child was born, he was publishing his ninth novel. He was also editing ...”

“... tower is ‘a square prism with pyramidal top in the traditional form of the obelisk’. Pelli is Nicholas Hawksmoor reborn, dominating the eastern reaches of London, the rusty, algae-clogged backwaters of the Lea, with hieratic Egyptian quotations. That New Labour pavilion, the Millennium Dome, is presented as a talisman, ‘covered by the largest roof in ...”

“... black ink from his student days at Jesus. There are numerous pencil annotations and links to Thomas Hardy. There are tutting knuckle-raps: ‘No.’ ‘Crass.’ With the odd B+ sop: ‘Elements of a clear insight here.’ As Moore points out, Prynne, director of studies at Caius, kept two ledgers recording the volumes circulated from his own ...”

“... on the bandwagon. But the press ignored this. ‘The story was in the bag before I even spoke,’ Nicholas Holgate, Kensington and Chelsea Council’s town clerk, told me. ‘As a civil servant for 24 years and a local government officer for eight and a half years I was trained to be impartial, objective and evidence-driven. None of that was evident in the ...”

“... arrange a meeting for me with anyone in the building. On a video call I asked a senior executive, Thomas Wildsmith, if older townspeople were ever invited to see what they get up to. ‘It’s not easy just to open the doors to everyone,’ he said. ‘We’ve done that in the past. We hope to do it again in the future. I’ve been in and around Blyth for ...”