“... but literally as a channel of communication. All the post-Conquest English monarchs down to Henry VI married Frenchwomen, or women from one or other of those not quite so French areas such as Flanders. Within a century of the Conquest, England had become a mere subsidiary element in Henry II’s Angevin empire, with ...”

“... Her whole life was shaped by her mother’s straightforwardness and bravery in a crisis: when Henry VIII wanted Katherine to accept that she had never been married to him, she refused to do so, and by her unchanging refusal, gave her daughter an example of how to behave. Mary spent her life trying to undo the wrong done to her mother and her mother’s ...”

“... good reason that many people who actually knew him, including someone with so good a judgment as Henry James, found him utterly charming. The charm, if one thinks of it, must have lain in a kind of innocence, the insouciance of a born talker. He may have been all the bad things I have called him, but unaffectedly so and without calculation; if he was ...”

“... has suffered repeated jolts to its 16th and 17th-century foundations. In The Political World of Thomas Wentworth – a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and ...”

“... dissolution of the monasteries, and the judicial murder of monks and abbots during the reign of Henry VIII (after the rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, for example, Henry ordered that the chief monks at Sawley Abbey were to be hanged ‘out of the steeple’). The consecrated wall is similar to the multitude of ...”

“... people to shout admiringly or scream abuse at him in the street, and provokes his staid brother Henry to accuse him of having ruined their parents’ lives by holding them up to public ridicule in the novel’s thinly disguised portraits of them and their world. In vain Zuckerman protests the innocence of his artistic intentions: ‘Life and art are ...”

“... an extraordinary – and extraordinarily interesting – book, a model of intellectual biography. Henry Sidgwick’s day job was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. He is today best known as the author of Methods of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously ...”

“... and for me to study his cuff buttons. I found it hard to see the man inside the clothes; and like Thomas Cromwell in my novels, I couldn’t help winding the fabric back onto the bolt and pricing him by the yard. At this ceremony, which was formal and carefully orchestrated, the prince gave an award to a young author who came up on stage in shirtsleeves to ...”

“... the nature of equality within marriage’.The private lives considered are those of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle; Effie Gray and John Ruskin; Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill; Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens; George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. This is the form in which Rose presents the couples, with the women ...”

“... shades vigilantly or solicitously hovering over their shoulders as they write. The biographer of Thomas Carlyle is supervised more severely than most: the irritable, brooding Scotsman, the would-be redeemer, and, failing that, the scourge of Victorian England, seems to breathe flame down his neck. To write about Carlyle with both authority and imagination is ...”

“... she ‘enticed this small dog’ to mate with her and later produced puppies. In 1792, Lieutenant Henry Ball anchored the HMS Supply in Plymouth. It seems the ship was misnamed – supplies had been short on its latest voyage, and the crew had eaten some of the kangaroos they were carrying. Three unappetising ones survived, two of which were presented to ...”

“... but ashes and clay – to be radically permeable. Pilgrims to Canterbury drank holy water from St Thomas Becket’s shrine because it was thought to be mixed with his blood; they chewed the melted wax or burnt wicks of the candles that lay before the altar. St Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, was so holy that he took a bite out of a relic: the arm bone of Mary ...”

“... 1946, well before McCarthyism, he published a detailed exposé of the American Communist Party in Henry Luce’s Life magazine. In Schlesinger’s telling, the minuscule communist presence in the country had ballooned into a vast left-wing conspiracy. ‘Communists are working overtime to expand party influence, open and covert, in the labour movement, among ...”

“... family betrayal: at first of the inheritance of the broad-church Anglicanism of his famous father, Thomas Arnold; and then – not once, but twice – in the danger to his marriage to Julia, the anti-Catholic he had married in New Zealand. Bernard Bergonzi’s description of Thomas Arnold the Younger as a ‘Victorian ...”