“... have served during the conquest of Britain under Claudius nearly twenty years earlier. His face may not be the most prepossessing – he had a small chin and protruding ears – but it did belong to him alone. The stone was commissioned, not unusually, by the centurion’s grateful freedmen, or ex-slaves, Verecundus and Novicius. The first ‘securely dated ...”

“... tentatively, allowing his idol and besotted patron first dibs on divining the future – which may prove to be less golden than the sun’s shafts seem to promise. What if the guide has lost his touch, can no longer read the entrails? Speer’s detachment and poised ambiguity were not entirely affectations. He was a provincial snob who regarded ...”

“... brats. ‘She had 2 Bastards, others say Three,’ Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear ...”

“... tolerance and language fluency. Although he responded to each test as if it were his first, he may have developed a vague undertow of déjà vu; he once remarked to a researcher with characteristic drollery: ‘You just live and learn. I’m living, you’re learning.’ Yet some aspects of his inner life remained mysterious. Did he, for example, remember ...”

“... people to haul loads. A single horse can exert enough force to pull up to thirty tonnes. This may seem astonishing and incredible, but it is really quite simple. Wheels are very well made and roads are well surfaced. Anyone acquainted with contemporary Japan’s superb public transport network may be surprised that ...”

“... That union causes the first conflict in the history of the universe. Afraid that his children may succeed him, Heaven tries to keep them inside Earth’s body, an ‘evil act’ which is met with ‘an evil plan’. Earth manufactures a sickle, arms her unborn son Kronos, and makes him castrate his father. Kronos eventually becomes the ruler of the ...”

“... to destitution. James Mangan – ‘Clarence’ was a later addition – was born in Dublin on 1 May 1803, ‘amid scenes of blasphemy and riot’, if we are to credit a fragment of autobiography he wrote in the last months of his life. As epigraph to that bizarre document, Mangan quoted two lines he claimed to have found in Philip Massinger, though no one ...”

“... has an intrinsic or a purely instrumental value. For much conservative thought, democracy may have its uses, but it is hardly a good in itself. Better for a single sovereign to reach the right decision than for a sovereign people to botch the business. And though democracy may thrive in English soil, it ...”

“... he is not ‘a highbrow with intellectual leanings’ but ‘a simple, rather stupid man’. This may have been said only to outbid Elspeth Huxley in a modesty contest, but he could sometimes be genuinely overawed by the company. Arriving at a very grand luncheon party, he saw ‘ten sophisticated guests assembled’ and would have bolted had his wife not ...”

“... parades never seem to get rained on. Even literary critics, who will naturally feel flattered, may wonder what the value of this parallel creation might be to or in the world. Butler answered this question only later, by means of her most famous concept, ‘performativity’. According to this, to play self-consciously and theatrically with identity, as a ...”

“... Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa may be ‘the world’s most famous painting’ but almost everything about it is obscure. We don’t know precisely when it was painted, we don’t know for certain who she is, and as we stare at her puzzling features for the umpteenth time we are inclined to ask ourselves: what is it about her? It is that question, in all its historical and cultural ramifications, which is addressed in Donald Sassoon’s elegant and comprehensive study of the Mona Lisa phenomenon ...”

“... claim: ‘This change began, to speak approximately, as we must, in the 17th century and may be described as the transition in the art of the West from a poetics of hallucination typical of Spenser to a poetics of delirium, inaugurated by Milton’. The West? That is a large claim. The change Teskey claims Milton represents is not a clean ...”

“... well underway. It had many modern features. ‘The British,’ Scientific American reported on 19 May 1855, ‘have displayed great inferiority in military management in the present war with Russia,’ but it cannot be denied but that the national spirit for engineering enterprise has not failed to show itself in the most favourable light. Thus in the Crimea ...”

“... a human performer impersonating a satyr, and the garlanded wine jar on the stand next to him may be the competition prize. We don’t know where Vibius Philippus was working, but Marsyas had a statue in the Forum in Rome, where he was seen as a symbol of liberty. Dionysiac imagery appeared on vases and bronzes all over Italy at this time, as did scenes ...”

“... its ironic blending of high and low, its whispered implication that things might be different. May not the Linnin of a Tiburn slave, More honour then a mighty Monarke have? That though he dyed a Traytor most disloyall, His Shirt may be transform’d to Paper royall. And may not dirty ...”