“... with the female lead is offset only by his boundless greed; a blind judge, the famous Sir John Fielding, who is widely believed to have been deceived by the enchanting villainess, despite his legendary reputation for discerning innocence or guilt in the voices of defendants; a rich and gullible Jewish sugar-daddy who attracts hints of anti-semitism; a ...”

“... quite accepted. Lewis’s recommendation of them was a poisoned chalice for critics, since he took them as myth rather than literature, and regarded the actual words, which involve much archaism, some archness, and a tendency to capitalise Life and Love and Death, as ‘almost an accident’. Epigraphs from Goethe, Novalis, Schiller and Schleiermacher do ...”

“... Sophoclean lines: Creon forbade the burial of Polynices; Antigone, and Polynices’s wife Argeia, took up the body by night and put it on Eteocles’s pyre; when the guards surprised them, Argeia escaped, Antigone was captured; Creon handed her over to Haemon, with orders to kill her. But then:Haemon, in the grip of love, disregarded his father’s orders. He ...”

“... in decades. He is straight out of a 1950s sitcom as All-American Dad: beloved teacher, coach who took the losing high school football team to the state championship, long-term military man, hunter and fisherman, star of YouTube videos where he fixes his car or talks about the importance of cleaning out the gutters on your house. Yet he has also been perhaps ...”

“... of Shuruppak in southern Iraq, who built a boat to preserve his family and the birds and beasts he took on board. The first bird released after six days of floods ‘flew to and fro but found no resting place’. The similarity between this text and the narrative of the Flood in Genesis caused a sensation after the tablet was excavated by Hormuzd Rassam at ...”

“... On​ 12 December 1884, Henry James took a break from writing the novel that would be published as The Princess Casamassima and went on a research trip to Millbank Prison on the north bank of the Thames. The prison was swampy, labyrinthine and dark. In the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, an impressionable young bookbinder, goes there to visit his dying mother, whose criminal past, we soon learn, has a central role in her son’s mentality and is a cause of his undoing, as he becomes lost in a London filled with social venom and anarchist plots ...”

“... the water’ had never heard of it. Those who wanted to see it for themselves mostly took the steamer from Liverpool. The crossing is notoriously rough and lasts 11 hours, which half the boat spend knocking it back and the other half throwing it up. This leaves Belfast facing a deficit of good will and may be one reason why the city has never ...”

“... practitioners, with his own assistants, and not least with his own even more eminent brother, John. Hunter proffered a sinister materialistic explanation for the anatomists’ psychic violence: ‘the passive submission of dead bodies, their common objects, may render them less able to bear contradiction.’ No finer case exists of just that psychological ...”

“... Kauffmann – a novelist as well as a film critic – originated both gabbiness and vomitous, and John Betjeman was the first and, indeed, the only person ever to use the word plung (which the OED defines as ‘a resonant noise as of a tennis racket striking a ball’ and categorises, with some understatement, as ‘rare’). In general, 1952 was a good year ...”

“... a mention had it not been for the fact that the latest massacre – the third in as many weeks – took place near the centre of Algiers, too close to the international communications networks to be ignored. Both events, however, represent public relations disasters for their governments. Saudi Arabia, while holding executions and floggings in public to ...”

“... serious big time. And that image seemed to be confirmed, in the mid-Sixties, when Chelsea players took to hanging out in the King’s Road boutiques and hostelries of Swinging London. Chelsea’s team of that decade – the team of Venables, Tambling, Bridges and so on – was often wonderful to watch, but you could see what was meant when people sneered at ...”

“... in the world when it was wrecked in the late 16th century. The ship gave its name to Port Saint John, where it is believed to have sunk on its return from Cochin China, with a cargo of spices and china, but my friend has been picking up a quantity of cannonshot as well as pieces of willow pattern-like china. Drilling down into the sandbank at the edge of ...”

“... castle, thus turning its citizens into subjects of the absolutist state. In October 1632, demons took possession of a group of Ursuline nuns. Exorcists were called in, but exorcism did not drive out the demons; instead, it established a method of communicating with them. For four years the demons testified: although demons are natural liars it was maintained ...”

“... disappeared from Constantinople, the Danish historian J.L. Heiburg noticed the darker text and took some grainy photographs, from which he copied what he could see of the Greek through a magnifying glass. But here was the palimpsest itself, finally available for further study. The auction was fraught. Major American universities competed with ...”

“... Britain’s application for entry to the Common Market as soon as he was in Downing Street, Heath took eighteen months to negotiate terms that were satisfactory to him and to Pompidou, a period probably extended by the need for Ireland and Denmark to do the same (Norway having opted out). The arithmetic in the Commons was not unfavourable. The Tories had 330 ...”