“... In​ 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more ...”

“... true church’, but not ‘the unspotted lambs of the Lord’ as the Elizabethan chronicler John Stow claimed (this was another slur: Stow had Catholic sympathies).Puritanism has long commanded historical attention. Collinson helped put the politics back in, working with the grain of the ‘new’ social and cultural histories of the 1980s. What emerged ...”

“... Choir. By 1914 she was working as an assistant at the Ashmolean Museum. During the war Matheson took up clerical posts with the Mayor of London’s emergency fund and the Third General Hospital, then the War Office and, probably on the recommendation of her Oxford tutors, the Security Intelligence Bureau. She worked in espionage in London and later in ...”

“... repurposed for a documentary). The new 3D version of the movie released in time for the centenary took its gross earnings above two billion dollars. In the movie, the 101-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater, who was 17 when she survived the sinking, learns that a 1996 expedition had been looking for a necklace, the Heart of the Ocean, that went down with the ship ...”

“... to have its closest affinities with recent cinematic exports such as Jane Campion’s Sweetie and John Ruane’s Death in Brunswick. (Particularly the latter, since in this novel Carey has made a brave and largely successful attempt to reflect the diversity of Australia’s immigrant culture, with all its attendant conflicts and resentments.) The Catchprices ...”

“... reincarnation, poltergeists and the irregular behaviour of mummies. His challenge to Stevenson took only six weeks to write. On 2 September 1885 Londoners woke to find their city plastered with posters announcing ‘King Solomon’s Mines – The Most Amazing Story Ever Written.’ Cassell had organised a splendid hype. Haggard wrote two other bestsellers ...”

“... fought for his measure every bit as relentlessly as Alan Clark fought for animals in leg traps. He took on civil servants, Post Office mandarins, and was even prepared to defy the Queen herself. Then one day Harold Wilson summoned him and put a stop to the whole business. The Queen’s head remains to this day. In Tony Benn’s memoirs it is difficult to find ...”

“... of Edward Bond directed by Bill Gaskill, or David Storey’s directed by Lindsay Anderson, or John Osborne’s titanic hymn to misanthropy, Inadmissible Evidence, or for that matter, Alpha Beta by Ted Whitehead, Veterans by Charles Wood, The Arbour by Andrea Dunbar, or Caryl Churchill’s plays directed by Max Stafford-Clark, or the plays of Christopher ...”

“... except in the peripheral area of Afghanistan and it is not clear whether the Eastern Europeans took heart from that defeat. Perhaps appropriately in a Marxist state, economics seem to have been more important than political or military issues in changing Soviet policy. We know that the Soviet leaders were depressed by the growing backwardness of their ...”

“... manipulation and the ‘selfish gene’. The dispiriting apogee to this curve of ‘hope’ took the form for me of a sad request from an aspiring Indian PhD student to seek the name(s) of god(s) in the sequences of DNA. So, how did we descend to this vacuous replacing of one level of ignorance by another, and the proclaiming of each in turn as the ...”

“... passages of the Bible and on myths of Saxon freedom, while the American and French Revolutions took Republican Rome as a model. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that, since the 1820s, images of Ancient Greece, and of Athens in particular, have usually served a progressive function, even though antebellum Southern writers used them to demonstrate the ...”

“... century moved on, Wisenschaft, a portmanteau word connoting the highest possible academic culture, took hold of the British academic imagination. Would be scholars, slogging away at the education of young men who behaved like boys, rose as from the dead to salute the hard-working German professors on their magic mountains who did not have to shape the ...”

“... of reparation to her slighted mother. Her feminist commitment was sustained for decades, and it took many forms. She worked for legal reform, particularly for the recognition of autonomy for married women. She founded the campaigning English Woman’s Journal. She helped establish the Kensington Society, which pioneered women’s demands for suffrage. She ...”

“... written: for Wills could not only draw on the experiences of an astonishing twenty years which took gliding, and him with it, from a broomstick-and-bungey affair at the Wasserkuppe and Dunstable Downs to flights over unheard-of distances and a World Championship – he could also write divinely.On Being a Bird replaced Terence Horsley’s Soaring Flight as ...”

“... Marx made a communist of me’ sounds stirring enough. On 13 November 1887 the 31-year-old Shaw took part in the famous, and illegal, demonstration for free speech which came to be known as Bloody Sunday. The march set out from Clerkenwell Green, Annie Besant and Shaw being among the many who carried banners. Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx and the other leftist ...”