“... a book to set beside W.C. Jordan’s Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (1979) and Jean Richard’s Saint Louis (1983, translated in 1992). Jordan remains invaluable on Louis’s administrative reforms, and Richard on the intricacies of French dynastic politics, but Le Goff excels in his knowledge of the ...”

“... Miltown was no better than a placebo. A more elegant study to the same effect was published by Richard Gracely and his colleagues in 1985. Gracely purported to be studying a pain reliever called fentanyl in patients recovering after having their wisdom teeth removed. But he was more interested in whether a clinician’s attitude relieved pain. So he ...”

“... The Cradle Will Rock and attaches suitable significance to Welles’s 1941 Broadway staging of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which was no less daring than Citizen Kane. In any case, it would be impossible to ignore politics when writing about Welles’s wartime activities, and especially the ill-fated government-subsidised documentary It’s All True, the ...”

“... at an increasingly hostile Asia and dangerous Europe. Finding it impossible to hold out, Hull ‘rose to the occasion magnificently’, an observer wrote, announcing that the United States would henceforth ‘shun and reject’ the ‘so-called right-of-conquest … The New Deal indeed would be an empty boast if it did not mean that.’ Latin American ...”

“... his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly rose through the ranks to become precentor, and spent his dotage working on the cathedral’s medieval manuscripts.In the course of his research, Bannister struck up a correspondence with Montague Rhodes James. Though he is now more famous for his ghost ...”

“... on the picture reads ‘MANIFEST DESTINY ONWARD TO MARS’, denouncing the hubris of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, with their desire to colonise the sky above us, other planets, space itself. Smith’s dislodged landmass is almost awash in coastal flooding: entire states (Texas, Florida, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts) and swathes of the ...”

“... Libels, a particularly dispiriting demonstration of prejudice at work.* Edith Swan and Rose Gooding were neighbours who quarrelled, a disagreement which began in 1920 and led to a spate of abusive letters, most of them sent to Swan. In 1921, Swan launched a private prosecution for criminal libel against Gooding. Despite the lack of solid ...”

“... the hands of the population of Canterbury, and his readiness to anticipate betrayal by the English rose he becomes attached to, a nurse called Catherine, are not signs of paranoia: for Daud is a black Muslim from Tanzania, and most of the white locals are either patronising or unforthcoming or directly hostile about ‘coons and wogs and smelly niggers’. The ...”

“... Carew addressed to his beloved: Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose: For in your Beauty’s orient deep, These flowers as in their causes, sleep. Appropriate in its strange way: Carew’s essence of beauty is the opposite of what lives in the work of dunces, and yet Carew’s sense of wonder is to linger on in Pope’s ...”

“... sophisticated seekers after the purely indigenous origins of American fiction, as in the work of Richard Poirier (A World Elsewhere) or R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam). One can see how smoothly Faulkner’s concentration on one obscure corner of Mississippi fits into this regionalist-patriotic pattern. His latest biographer says on his first page: ‘He is ...”

“... of future troubles. A baby brother died when she was six, and within the year another brother, Richard, died from scarlet fever. As Susannah Clapp put it in her review of Fitzgerald’s biography (LRB, 20 December 1984), Mew liked to play the child, but child’s play was always a peculiarly fraught affair. In one poem she addresses Sorrow and remembers ...”

“... This astonishing and brilliant revival of independence and creative energy is the subject of Richard Butterwick’s book. For Catherine, though, as for the Habsburg emperor and the Prussian king, this resurrection was insufferable. In 1795 the armies of all three tramped in to carry out the last of the late 18th-century partitions of the Commonwealth and ...”

“... cancer that were diagnosed a few years after he quit. One of Beckett’s best discoveries is Dr Richard Stone, whose father, Joe Stone, had been Wilson’s GP since the 1940s – a job that the junior Stone took over for the last 12 years of Wilson’s life. ‘Harold had been the master of the detail, and then he didn’t have the detail,’ ...”

“... problem. So too, for many, is the God-human thing. That question hasn’t quite gone away – as Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists would like it to – but you don’t get published in philosophy or neurophysiology journals by invoking our unique relationship to a Creator God as a way of accounting for our mental and vital properties. The human-machine ...”

“... and quickly took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ...”