“... the Psammead, or sand fairy, a creature that looks a bit like a monkey with eyes on stalks, can grant a wish a day and hates getting wet. In The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), the children discover a flying carpet that can take them anywhere in the world: its daily allowance is three wishes. The Phoenix, like the Psammead, is of an awkward but basically ...”

“... rejects the views of more than half the population, and was redesigned, starting in the 1890s, to grant state legislatures the power to restrict the access of third parties to the ballot? ‘Learn from peers in other countries,’ Snyder writes, but nowhere does he mention several of the countries which themselves have, or recently had, Trump-like ...”

“... at whose table there was only bottled beer to drink, and no pudding followed the meat; devout Thomas Combe, whose patronage of the Pre-Raphaelites was part and parcel of his High Churchmanship (it was he who commissioned Holman Hunt’s Light of the World); the obsessive Thomas Plint, whose death at the age of 38 left ...”

“... truth and justice in their own case, to find the trail silently erased by the thin blue line? Sir Thomas Browne wrote of the hazard of fame in Urne Buriall: ‘but the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy.’ It is the oblivion of iniquity that defines our contemporary predicament. Milan Kundera is one of those writers from Eastern Europe who ...”

“... de Briouze, Lord of Gower, and sentenced by him to hang as a rebel and a homicide. The saint was Thomas de Cantilupe, former bishop of Hereford, who had died in 1282. From soon after his death posthumous miracles had begun to be attributed to him, and he was officially canonised by Pope John XXII in 1320. The story, in outline, runs thus. On the morning of ...”

“... as not especially consequential. In Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change (1997), Richard Fisher, Grant Heiken and Jeffrey Hulen devote only half a sentence to it: ‘The dust cloud … lasted less than two years, and its effects upon the environment, though harmful to people, were short-lived.’ But Wood, who intends no hyperbole in his subtitle, makes a ...”

“... looking back from 1555. A student at Wittenberg, he becomes a follower of the radical theologian Thomas Müntzer after witnessing a dispute between Müntzer and Martin Luther; Luther Blissett is very much not on his namesake’s side. The narrator’s story begins a few years later, in medias res, at Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525, when Philip of Hesse’s ...”

“... I’d depended on the History of ‘A’ Battery, 84th Army Brigade, RFA 1914-18 by Major D.F. Grant MC (1922). Unusually, the major had commanded the battery throughout, making him paterfamilias to his small group, at most three hundred men, among them my father. Lieut. R. Darley turns up in his pages quite a bit. Once, ingloriously, he unloads munitions ...”

“... MacDonald, accompanied by Philip Snowden, chancellor in both Labour governments, and J.H. Thomas, colonial secretary in 1924, joined the National Government dominated by the Conservatives. After that, the shortcomings of the 1924 government came to be regarded as a rehearsal for the more profound betrayal of 1931. The Labour government elected in ...”

“... or even Vermeer-forging, sense. Some gentlemanly code of ethics enfolds the activities of Thomas Wise and his fellows. As for purely literary, as opposed to bibliographical forgery, it receives no censure at all. Indeed, it receives rather high esteem. James Crossley, the distinguished 19th-century antiquarian and bibliographer, plumed himself on ...”

“... to ‘beastly’, his ‘constipation’ to ‘indigestion’ and his ‘God grant’ to ‘I only hope’. His own labours came to an end with the five volumes of letters in the Tusitala edition of 1924, since when innumerable further letters have turned up. Plenty of need, then, for a new edition, and the task was undertaken as far back ...”

“... few hymnodists who have been accepted or half-accepted into the literary canon – George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious ...”

“... 1 January 2009, around two in the morning, 19 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black man, was shot in the back by a white transit officer in Oakland, California while lying face down on a train platform with his hands behind his back. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died seven hours later. Minutes ...”

“... Every age​ creates its own Chaucer. For Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary, he was the ‘grant translateur’. For Hoccleve, a disciple, he was ‘my deere maistir’ and ‘the firste fyndere [inventive poet] of our fair langage’. The 15th century revered him for his eloquence, while the 20th century gave us many Chaucers: genial naif, apostle of courtly love, austere Augustinian moralist, sycophantic courtier, ironist and, not least, duelling misogynist and feminist versions ...”

“... fearful battles of the spring of 1864 threw everything into new confusion and doubt. That was why Grant said he would ‘fight it out on this line all summer if necessary’. It is wrong, as McPherson shows, to think that Grant sought a war of attrition: he was presented with it, and knew that he could not afford to ...”