“... 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 ...”

“... whose name suggests his role as ‘the most accomplished drunk’ in the entire Spokane nation; Thomas Builds-the-Fire, a teetotaler and the tribal storyteller, but a young man to whom nobody much wants to listen; and Victor Joseph, who doesn’t want to call a Spokane rock band ‘Coyote Spring’ because it sounds ‘too damn Indian’. Of these Victor ...”

“... were few wealthy abbeys left to seize; the very last was Waltham Abbey, on 23 March 1540, where Thomas Tallis was employed.Tallis, who was then about 35, had been at Dover Priory when it met a similar fate five years earlier. He left Waltham Abbey with forty shillings, twenty in ‘wages’ and twenty in ‘rewards’; and took with him at least one ...”

“... required to draw a map of old Palestine, ‘indicating the position of the Jewish tribes’. Thomas Jervis’s map of the Crimean peninsula Biblical Palestine loomed large in the teaching of geography for generations of British children: I can remember drawing maps of it at Sunday school in the 1960s, to accompany my own newspaper supplement featuring ...”

“... as much as disempowering them, providing a space in which they could speak publicly. Thomas Telford Campbell, the son of the poet Thomas Campbell, impressed the jury with the ‘urbanity, coolness and composure’ of his performance in cross-examining witnesses, and persuaded them to reject the medical ...”

“... model came along in 1972 the tools used were Kaplan-Meier estimators, developed in 1958 after Edward Kaplan, working at Bell Labs on the problem of vacuum tube survival in transatlantic telephone cable repeaters, was put in touch with Paul Meier, who was working on cancer survival using a similar method.) The use of these techniques in medicine and in the ...”

“... distinguished poems here by Jill Bowers, Jack Barrack and (a practised hand, which shows) Charles Edward Eaton; from William Radice (a beautifully imagined variation on Virgil), and Mark Beeson (a similarly accomplished essay in the Dantesque); from Pauline Rainford, Monica Ditmas, Anne Stevenson (two) and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another ...”

“... been allocated. The monarchs are presumably here by right and the leading statesmen by merit. Thus Edward VI is shunted off in six lines, with a cross-reference to the Reformation, whereas Thomas Cromwell gets 21 lines to himself plus a separate entry under Tudor Revolution in Government. This may indicate the administrative ...”

“... laughably called the nuclear deterrent and 11 per cent are undecided – blessed followers of St Thomas. The man in the pew is said to support the nuclear deterrent. No figures are given for this assertion. The vocabulary used in discussing nuclear weapons is peculiarly misleading, almost as though the nuclear advocates are ashamed of what they are ...”

“... him, these poets celebrated their own willingness to move among the ‘roughs’. However, as Edward Field’s anthology A Geography of Poets makes clear, Ginsberg’s influence within California is largely confined to San Francisco and the north. To the south, and in Los Angeles, the dominant figure is Charles Bukowski. Bukowski has spent the last 35 ...”

“... use texts in either language. In five years, we’ve picked our way through Ronsard, Tennyson, Edward Lear, Wendy Cope, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Yeats, Herbert, Donne, Larkin, Housman (who, I discover, admitted to his French translator that he had never spent much time in Shropshire), John Clare, A.A. Milne, Shelley, Blake, Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and ...”

“... Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind the iconic mask of royalty, she apologised for her appearance, ‘the face ... I might well blush to offer’, but not for her mind, of which she would never be ashamed. It was a mind which as yet ...”

“... Morton (a journalist friend of Thackeray), Augustus Noel Follin (a businessman from Cincinnati), Edward Payson Willis (a literary black sheep) and, most scandalously of all, King Ludwig of Bavaria, whose long entanglement with Lola brought disgrace, in the opinion of many, on the city of Munich. ‘What a hold this miserable witch has obtained over this ...”