“... the finest portraits is that of Teresa, Lady Shirley, painted in Rome in 1622. The daughter of a Christian Circassian chieftain, she had married Robert Shirley in Persia and is shown draped in a kind of tent of gold fabric – the effect of her clothes is splendidly exotic. Her thin-lipped, quizzical half-smile is less contrived than those of many of the ...”

“... and Robert the Mason began the transformation of the Roman shrine to St Alban, the first British Christian martyr, into a Norman church of handsome proportions, eventually dedicated in 1115. A succession of ambitious and not always scrupulous abbots and master masons enlarged and extended the abbey church over the following centuries. Eventually the ...”

“... just as they are absent in the novels. He knew nothing of their source, or how they operated. William Connor, the Daily Mirror’s Cassandra, notoriously attacked him in the war for broadcasting ‘on behalf of the Germans’ when he was interned after the French debacle: a particularly malicious lie, because Wodehouse was obviously sending no more than ...”

“... of Dilettanti and Wood’s essay on the original genius of Homer. During the Seventies, Sir William Hamilton, who had personally taken part in the excavations, did much to make the new discoveries known. After England’s isolation from the Continent was ended by Napoleon’s defeat, interest in the buried cities heightened. Two very different ...”

“... by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical narrative, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. Lawrence, and on Structuralism, which Lodge as late as 1980 regarded as ‘the most significant ...”

“... are now drawing students from far and wide. He sets himself up against the reigning masters like William of Champeaux, a Platonist of whom Gordon Leff says that he resembled Lenin by confusing mental categories with real life. After a trip north to cause trouble in the school of Laon, Abelard comes back to Paris, perhaps under the auspices of King Louis’s ...”

“... and technically adroit articulation of the question that Anita Brookner has so far produced. In William Boyd’s The New Confessions a crucial part is played by Rousseau’s old ones, and the presence of its precursor is not altogether to the novel’s advantage. The revelations are made by John James Todd, a forgotten film-director in Mediterranean exile ...”

“... on race, between an extraordinary openness to assimilation and outbursts of unashamed racism? William Nelson’s Enlightenment Biopolitics offers an elegant solution to the puzzle. French revolutionaries held such extreme views, he argues, because the French Enlightenment pioneered scientific racism a century before adepts of Darwin built racist ...”

“... in whose head an infinity of names and places are buzzing around: the 17th-century antiquarian was William Dugdale, not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; ...”

“... father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right? For more than half a century, he supplied a gloss of coherence and glamour to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his mid-Atlantic drawl and slaloming locutions, he held out the suggestion ...”

“... own or full political rights. A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was ...”

“... obediently transcribing the Calvinism of Alexander Nowell’s Catechism or First Instruction of Christian Religion. At the same time, however, they were given the means of escape to a different mental world: instead of being taught the medieval Latin that had prepared their pre-Reformation forbears to study Catholic theology, they were taught the classical ...”

“... public schools and Oxbridge; patronised the arts and the London Season; and propounded traditional Christian values in highbrow journalism and popular fiction – even when they were racked by religious doubt. The ruling class ruled because it was clever, because it was well off, and because it hung together. It wore the old school tie, congregated in the Home ...”

“... equally. The growth of religious fanaticism in Israel must, I think, be connected to retrograde Christian passions in Lebanon, Islamic emotions in Egypt and elsewhere. I am not interested in determining which of the three religions is less tolerant, but it is a historical fact that Israel, founded in 1948, is the first quasi-theocratic state in the Middle ...”

“... witches by sensations in your thumbs and other talents of that kind. It was, after all, the Christian faith, not Christian reason, that was enforced on Christendom for thirteen or so centuries. Even when he descends from the sweeping to the particular, Mr Harbison gets it ineffably wrong. The conception of a world ...”