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“... anthropology of the Men and Women’s Club all brought sex under the sign of ‘science’. Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds presented homosexuality as an admirable inversion, a sort of in-between sex with many good features. Radical feminists like Elizabeth Wolstenholme argued that menstruation is the unnatural result of male sexual appetite ...”

“... by Dower may be contemporary, but they display long-recognised kinds of muddled thinking. Edward Morgan, who drafted the majority report of the committee that investigated US intelligence failures leading up to Pearl Harbor, asked Admiral Husband Kimmel, commander of the naval base in Hawaii, why he’d failed to move his fleet despite warnings in ...”

“... evangelicals to abandon their reformed opinions and convert to Catholicism. They included Thomas Harding, a one-time ardent evangelical, and chaplain to Lady Jane Grey’s father. Harding’s much publicised return to Catholicism at the end of 1553 elicited from Lady Jane a bitter tirade as she awaited execution in the Tower, for having become so soon ...”

“... is the family’s great collection of paintings, including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry ...”

“... the abandoned child in The Death of the Heart (1938), is to be stored for a year with her brother Thomas Quayne and his wife, Anna, in their desirable residence at 2 Windsor Terrace, Regent’s Park, in the expectation either that they might grow to like her, or that she’ll somehow acquire a husband (she’s sixteen). If all else fails, Portia will ‘go ...”

“... he studied at Ghent and in the Antwerp Academy. Unlike William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Edward Burne-Jones, Brown profited from a broad and thorough education in the business of painting. Later, his art became a passion and a vocation. But it never ceased to be a job from which a living had somehow to be wrung. Adult cares came early. His devoted ...”

“... by centuries of rapt description of the place, and particularly by certain writings of Thomas Hardy, Evelyn Waugh and Max Beerbohm, we know exactly what Oxford will be: unearthly bliss in the moment, and the object of sweet, aching nostalgia ever after.’ The novel appears to be about to deflate this notion of Oxford, treating it ...”

“... enjoyed Indian careers of their own, and his eldest daughter, Charlotte, married the son of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, the British resident at Delhi. Mount has always been intrigued by cliques, elites and who knows who. The Shakespears were connected to the Thackerays (Augusta was the novelist’s cousin), and with the Metcalfes also thrown in, Mount is able to ...”

“... whether Jews could licitly demand interest from non-Jews remained a point of theological debate. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most influential medieval opponents of usury, described it as an unlawful attempt to charge someone for the use of time itself. For later defenders of interest this was what made it so useful: it was an enticement to get someone to part ...”

“... That wonderful Edward Coke,’ wrote the great Maitland, ‘masterful, masterless man.’ Others prefer the judgment of the Australian judge and historian James Spigelman: Coke’s mind ‘was so narrow and unsubtle, so incapable of jettisoning detail, so often inconsistent, that no one has ever speculated that he wrote the works of Shakespeare ...”

“... many of them seem ominous or doom-laden. New to me and to R. is Antonis Mor, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these paintings in particular as they’re crowded with detail and every dress and doublet draws you in to trace the ...”

“... In​ 1841 Thomas Carlyle declared that ‘the History of the world is but the Biography of great men.’ Soon after, Thomas Babington Macaulay, a policymaker in British India as well as a historian, wrote that ‘a people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants ...”

“... of the so-called Reformation Parliament, national business, derived from London interests. Sir Thomas More’s repressive reaction to the early Protestant movement was focused on London, as was Queen Anne Boleyn’s promotion of it. The fall of the reforming statesman Thomas Cromwell happened in London, with immediate ...”

“... For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of being in the right place at the right time. Thomas Mann could never find the revolution: Hitchens cannot help tripping over it. This is, no doubt, the privilege of the foreign correspondent, but some are clearly more privileged than others. He turns up in Central America, in Central Europe, in Eastern ...”

“... pioneered by Wellhausen and Goldziher. Wellhausen taught Robertson Smith, Robertson Smith taught Thomas Arnold, Thomas Arnold taught Hamilton Gibb and Gibb was Lewis’s teacher. As for Goldziher, there is a legend that he laid hands on the mystically inspired French scholar Louis Massignon (1883-1962), who was another of ...”