“... into speculations about a hidden love life – usually in terms of relations with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, or even Thomas Seymour, her abuser when she was 14. Once initiated, fantasies of this kind, which began to appear at the end of the 17th century with such prose works as The Secret History of the most ...”

“... student, though neither would be able to remember exactly where. He was born in Płock, fifty miles west of Warsaw, and over the course of the First World War the family followed his father, a doctor, as the front shifted: Warsaw, Vilnius, St Petersburg, then west again back to Płock. Arriving in the family home he had left four years earlier, Stefan ...”

“... with the extent of Elizabeth’s complicity in the plots against Mary, and especially in the Dudley conspiracy of 1555, which makes her survival even more of a miracle than it was for Foxe, who chose to know nothing about such things. But it was more a matter of policy than of providence, since what saved Elizabeth’s bacon was the fact that for ...”

“... for ‘mending shoes for the workmen’ and their wives at a forge. He took the iron three miles down the road to a blacksmith in the village of Whiston, whose servant and apprentice weighed and ‘presently wrought [it] up’ in the shop. Fishermen of South Huish in Devon were accustomed to receiving their payment in the form of the catch itself: as ...”

“... Altrincham have been nodes in Greater Manchester for decades now, but people in West Bromwich or Dudley, let alone Coventry or Wolverhampton, would blanch at being described as inhabitants of Greater Birmingham.Manchester today feels like the country’s second city in a way that Birmingham doesn’t, from the scale of its neo-Gothic architecture to its ...”

“... by Thomas Kuhn, who first described scientific revolutions in terms of ‘paradigm shifts’, and Dudley Shapere, who has tried to rescue the notion of objective truth, never complete but seen more and more correctly with the passing of time, from the limbo of relativism into which Kuhn’s analysis seemed to have cast it. Regis’s account of this debate is ...”

“... let the essential images come. Sitting here fingering a piece of purple coral from a beach a few miles away ... If and when such images come, how do we recognise them? Partly by their distinctive naked sensuous power as they surface in our writing. ‘What we have to look for are the signs of something grasped and held, presented in an ordering of ...”

“... boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in public – about a patient in hospital calling the nurse for a bedpan. He had quite plump arms and a raspberry blown against his upper arm sounded particularly revolting. This was accompanied by increasingly ...”

“... they first discovered Columbus on their beach in 1498 – although he landed some four hundred miles to the east, on the Peninsula de Paría, across the water from Trinidad. The plane often flies along the shoreline before landing, past Naiguatá, Macuto and La Guaira, and along to Maiquetía and Catia La Mar, small and rather grubby resorts with a handful ...”