“... Dekker has a character, an actor, who boasts: ‘I have so naturally played the Puritan that many took me to be one.’ Lake agrees that the stage Puritan did much to form perceptions of Puritanism, even self-perceptions. A Northamptonshire preacher delighted in telling his auditory that godly people like themselves were caricatured and castigated by the ...”

“... Grosskurth’s contribution, remembering her last biographical effort with pleasure. Her book on John Addington Symonds, now 16 years old, is one of the genuinely original works of its kind, a detailed and sensitive rescuing of its subject from the Victorian silence that entombed him. In writing about Symonds, historian of the Renaissance, Ms Grosskurth ...”

“... of gestation has had on a work. In the case of Braudel’s books (for The Mediterranean also took over twenty-five years to complete), it has produced a study of incredible richness and wisdom. The text, tables, illustrations, maps and captions all shed a light on everyday life in early modern Europe that is always fresh, interesting and convincing. Let ...”

“... biography that navigates the relationship between Jews, art and money in the years around 1900.John Singer Sargent seems to be in fashion: his ‘dollar princesses’ are on display at Kenwood House (until 5 October); his early years are the subject of a major show at the Musée d’Orsay, opening this month. For a long time, however, his work provoked ...”

“... wandering for days before stumbling back to their settlements. Atherton was among them.Susan Howe took Atherton’s ordeal after the ‘Falls Fight’ as the focal point for her poem sequence ‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’, which was published as a chapbook in 1987 and later collected in Singularities (1990). It was his name that first caught her ...”

“... of the Burgos junta did. They rested their case on the Indians’ own nature. They began from John Mair, a Scot at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, who had himself begun from Aristotle. Arguing against the more cautious theologians that Christian doctrine could not be at odds with the ‘true philosophy’, even if that philosophy had been proposed by a ...”

“... of life, was not healthy in early manhood, and was often exhausted by the amount of work he took on (being joint Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary) when in power. But we learn of other blindnesses. Take his sons. If they came upon him unexpectedly, it seems that Salisbury could not recognise them unless they spoke to him. Take Cabinet colleagues ...”

“... not free to marry him, thereby furnishing protection from decisive action.’ Lord Byron (also on John Murray’s list) once remarked: Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? Russell never married. He was of that company called ‘the lost generation’, as described by Jeanne Mackenzie in Children of ...”

“... to be demystified. The history of policing and punishing had its shortcomings, too. In Britain, it took the form of a Whiggish story of progress, narrated in support of reformist agendas. Fabian historians homed in on an ‘Age of Reform’ from the late 18th century: Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian penology, prison reform, campaigns against the death penalty ...”

“... afraid of things that may possibly happen in this country to them,’ the Los Angeles Archbishop John Cantwell observed in a letter to the Archbishop of Cincinnati in July 1933. The Hollywood Question was now a political matter. Anti-semitic stereotypes were employed by both supporters and opponents of Upton Sinclair’s campaign for Governor of ...”

“... This was colloquially known as the royal numerals case, brought by the nationalist politician John MacCormick against the assumption by the new queen of the style Elizabeth II – though she was patently the first monarch by the name of Elizabeth to reign over the post-1707 United Kingdom. Although Cooper found that MacCormick had no standing to bring the ...”

“... from the outset. Heaney’s ‘Follower’, from his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), took soundings from ‘As the team’s head-brass’: its tripping between ‘furrow’ and ‘narrowed’, ‘fell’ and ‘follow’ nods to Thomas’s strewn doublings (‘fallen’, ‘fallow’, ‘narrowing’, ‘yellow’), and its closing reversal ...”

“... pink rubber snakes, crucifixes, purple plastic grapes. Almost a year spent in such poverty that he took up panhandling seems to have enabled Brainard to see that anything could find its place in his rigorously constructed but ecumenical bric-à-brac shrines. One from 1965 named Prell after its central component, a very green shampoo, was well described by ...”

“... of Arc? ‘Know her? I went with her!’ And Robin Hood? ‘Lovely man. Ran around the forest. Took from everybody and kept it.’ Dietary secrets of long life? ‘Nectarines: a hell of a fruit. Not too cold, not too hot, you know. Just nice.’ Roy Walford, a gerontologist and immunologist in Los Angeles reckoned that both mice and men could substantially ...”

“... of becoming a Writer (and I thought of it in capital letters), so when Auden outlined what he took to be the prerequisites of a literary life, or at any rate a life devoted to poetry, I was properly dismayed. Besides favourite books, essential seemed to be a literary landscape (Leeds?), a knowledge of metre and scansion and (this was the clincher) a ...”