“... This is​ what happens when you die. Electricity stops flowing through your neural circuitry and consciousness shuts down as though a switch has been flicked. Blood keeps moving for a while, ebbing without the heart’s propulsion before succumbing to gravity and pooling in the lower back where it congeals. Starved of oxygen, cells are dismantled by enzymes with nothing else to do now life is at an end ...”

“... In the​ cold autumn of 1643 Susan Rodway wrote to ‘my king love’, her husband Robert. A candlemaker by trade, he was away fighting for Parliament and she hadn’t heard much from him, unlike her neighbours in the London parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West who all had news from their husbands. Their daughter, Hester, was just a baby and their young son, Willie, was sick ...”

“... At​ 1 p.m. on 13 July 1936, bidding opened at Sotheby’s on a trunk of Isaac Newton’s notebooks and papers. They had been in the family of the earl of Portsmouth for many years: a previous earl had lent them to the University of Cambridge, where scholars judged them of little scientific importance. Partly because of this indifference, the auction was overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast ...”

“... When​ I was growing up, there was only one name for the fifth of November: ‘Bonfire Night’. Much of the excitement lay in anticipation, which gained momentum in the last week of October, brushing confidently past Halloween, not yet the extravagant rite of autumn it has become. Like all memories, this flies back as a scatter of images: pestering Dad for an old shirt and trousers; tying up the arms and legs and cramming in newspaper; a balloon for a head in the hood of a coat; and, with a friend from down our street, begging outside Woolworths ...”

“... In the autumn​ of 2013, archaeologists digging beneath the chancel of a ruined church in Jamestown, Virginia, discovered four graves. They belonged to some of the earliest inhabitants of England’s first permanent colony in America. One was for Ferdinando Wainman, a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council; another for Robert Hunt, the church’s first minister and chaplain of the expedition that founded Jamestown ...”

“... In​ 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more ...”

“... Ortona,​ Christmas Eve, 1943. A thriving Adriatic port only days previously, it now lay in ruins. The population of ten thousand was gone. In their place were two battalions of elite Fallschirmjäger – German paratroopers – defending what was left of the town, and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, who were under orders to take it. There would be no festive truce ...”

“... The province​ of Enga in the highlands of Papua New Guinea is one of the poorest and most lawless places on earth. On 18 May 2015 ten men armed with machetes, axes and homemade guns entered the village of Fiyawena looking for a woman called Mifila, the mother of two young children. Six months earlier she and three other women had been accused of using witchcraft to cause a measles epidemic ...”

“... On​ 23 March 1944 Italian resistance fighters ambushed an SS company marching up via Rasella, a quiet street in central Rome. At 3.45 p.m. Rosario Bentivegna, a 21-year-old medical student, lit the fuse on a bomb hidden in a dustcart, then walked away. Fifty seconds later the bomb exploded. Bentivegna’s comrades opened fire and hurled grenades, then fled through the backstreets ...”

“... When​ my editor asked for dust-jacket ideas, I said I wanted something with snow. My book was about 17th-century America, and for all the sweltering, maize-shrivelling summers, it was the winters that had stuck in my mind. I’d found the perfect image: George Henry Boughton’s Pilgrims Going to Church (1867), a depiction of settlers in New Plymouth trudging through their first winter ...”

“... Teresa of Ávila​ was a late starter, but that was no bad thing for a paragon of piety. A perplexed or misspent adolescence emphasised the transforming power of grace in both Catholic hagiography and puritan conversion narratives. She was born into a Castilian merchant family in 1515, but her fortunes were compromised by her family’s dubious status ...”

“... The train​ from Verona to Udine crosses a plateau of vineyards and terracotta-roofed farms backed by an indistinct range of hills. After an hour or so it stops at Mestre, allowing a glimpse of Venice across the lagoon, then retreats into the campagna. As we headed north, the hills bulked larger and darker. We got off the train at Conegliano, just north of Treviso, where we caught a bus to Tezze di Piave ...”

“... leanings, have been enough to make the case bob back into public consciousness every few years. As Malcolm Gaskill says, ‘we inherit ancestral tales reworked by each generation to make their truth powerful rather than precise, moral rather than empirical.’ Among the majority today, reverence for Churchill survives surprisingly intact; it is a ...”

“... mile north-east of the city on the old Roman road. This is where William Pynchon, a key figure in Malcolm Gaskill’s new book, went to live in 1610. Born in 1590 in Writtle, another Essex village, he grew up to be a convinced Puritan, profoundly unsympathetic to the church of Charles I and William Laud. ...”

“... thinking’ reverberated in fiction and its portrayal of character and perception; and Malcolm Gaskill recently tackled, with amused brio, the life and times of the last of the materialising mediums, Helen Duncan, who was imprisoned for her activities and died only in 1956.2 In this lucid and richly layered study, Luckhurst echoes Terry ...”