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“... by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of liturgical commemoration, relics and shrines, pilgrimage, church dedications, personal and place names, images of the saints and literary genres, including hagiography ...”

“... what was left of his mind: not so much will to power as determined opportunism. Little beasts that lay their eggs in a larger creature and whose offspring use the living body of their host as a food store come to mind. Since the late 1950s scholars have been busy releasing Nietzsche’s reputation from the grip of Nazification. Elisabeth’s role in creating ...”

“... opened the way to her simplistic truths: Victorian values and all the rest. Mark Hollingsworth and Paul Halloran describe the way Mark took over the marketing of his mother’s memoirs, and almost completely messed it up. At one stage an experienced literary agent, George Greenfield, was brought in to advise, but found himself ‘constantly interrupted by Mrs ...”

“... Lewis had an affair, came to the conclusion that ‘on the whole, he was half a SHIT,’ while Paul Nash told Lewis that his character was ‘strangely sub-human’. His bellicosity towards those reckless enough to be generous towards him was even fiercer: when a cheque from his patron Fanny Wadsworth didn’t turn up promptly, she received a postcard that ...”

“... For Wagner, Aristotle’s Masterpiece is a pseudo-medical piece of erotica whose main appeal lay in its descriptions of ‘the Organs of Generation in Women’ and of ‘the Use and Action of the Genitals’. This cursory description confirms Roy Porter’s argument in ’Tis Nature’s Fault that, although well-known, Aristotle’s Masterpiece has too ...”

“... to have been ‘only like a boy playing on the seashore . . . whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’. Kary Mullis approaches the seashore from a different direction. On the day he won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Mullis went surfing. The camera crews tried to follow him down the Southern California coast, ‘asking ...”

“... of ‘left’ and ‘right’ were dead, we were told. In their place was a modern paradigm which lay in the tiger economies of the East, much celebrated for a couple of years – until they had the bad manners to collapse. In the end, it was the tone of voice, rather than what was said, that jarred. Leadbeater and the rest had lost their faith in ...”

“... Wordsworth’s genius lay in its own sort of negative capability. The most striking feature of his poetry, as of his personality, is their intense and intimate relations with what always remained outside them. He never seems identified with his own discoveries, even with the drama of his own sensibility. Yet what he writes is subtly and comfortingly self-confirmatory, never more so than when the world, the human heart, the music of humanity, the mountains, are speaking to him (‘as if admonished from another world’, ‘To give me human strength by apt admonishment ...”

“... the way for two fundamental changes: one was the encouragement of comunidades de base, grass-roots lay communities; the other was to lend theological support to the view that ‘structural violence’ was a form of physical violence – a move which legitimised the struggle against social injustice as a form of the struggle for peace. Over the past fifteen or ...”

“... education.’ These are lofty thoughts to set before the anti-smoking lobby, which likes to lay down the law much sooner than debate it. Klein’s study is largely about cigarettes in the context of creative work and the imagination: a cultural history of the gasper, in cinema, poetry, fiction, on stage or as an adjunct to philosophy – and also in the ...”

“... on the Western Front increased from 3.25 million to more than four million men by April 1918. Paul von Hindenburg, a stolid general who effectively replaced the kaiser as the figurehead of the German war effort after being brought out of retirement to win spectacular victories on the Eastern Front early in the war, and Quartermaster-General Erich ...”

“... consisted of ‘small black dots’ – knobbly, ‘like shagreen leather’ – below which there lay ‘watery fluid, and an incredible number of globules, each of which globules again consisted of a large number of smaller globules, each of which had in its centre a larger globule, so that each of the former globules looked, as it were, like an Egg with a ...”

“... the parliamentary opposition attacked Suez on anti-imperialist grounds, but its real significance lay in the fact that Britain had gone behind America’s back for the first time since before 1914, leaving Nato in tatters. All these losses made France even keener on the idea of Françafrique, a sort of semi-independence for African colonies that stayed in the ...”

“... found the word ‘death’ unsayable, and got round it by saying, of someone whose corpse lay in the next room, that ‘something had happened.’ ‘If anything ever happens to me,’ my mother would say, ‘you’ll find the Liverpool Assurance policy book in the cupboard up above the stock cubes.’ ‘If something happens to me,’ my grandmother ...”

“... taught me to read in the summer of 1945, between VE Day and VJ Day, when I was turning three. Time lay on her hands: my father, a major in the Territorials, was away in Palestine, battling Irgun and the Stern Gang in the latter days of the British Mandate, and wasn’t due to be demobilised from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her ...”