“... title implies, sanctuary seeking led to tense, unpredictable situations. The most notorious case, Thomas Becket’s murder in 1170, was shocking not only because he was slain in his own cathedral, but because on returning from exile he had explicitly sought sanctuary there. Only the public penance of Henry II and an exceptionally rapid canonisation could ...”

“... caprice, but a nymphomaniac and serial adulteress who was properly tried and legally executed. Thomas More, the genial philosopher, was not a saint but a sadistic bigot. The real Mary Tudor wasn’t the hate figure of myth. Pious, well-meaning and emotionally fragile, she’d been manipulated by Cardinal Pole, a ruthless éminence rouge with his sights on ...”

“... several orders of magnitude. Poring through these files in 1994 was a friend of Morley’s, John Newman, who was completing a book called Oswald and the CIA, published in 1995. Among the new files Newman spotted some routing slips from the CI Staff which recorded the arrival of documents circulated by the FBI, the National ...”

“... wife, Philippa, was Katherine’s sister, and so their children became part of this ménage. Thomas, his eldest son, was born around the same time as Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son by Blanche, who would seize the throne as Henry IV in 1399. It was Gaunt’s lavish patronage that enabled Thomas to make a brilliant ...”

“... Order around 1223 and spent most of his long academic career between Paris and Cologne, where Thomas Aquinas was his star student. Even then, the university was no ivory tower. Faculty had to deal with heresy charges, censorship by overreaching bishops, rivalry between friars and secular masters, and drunken brawls among students – who could matriculate ...”

“... to a public – and a legal system – that took racialised bondage entirely for granted.Simon Newman’s new book takes this story back to its origins in late 17th-century London, the birthplace both of large-scale English involvement in transatlantic slavery and of the first popular printed English newspapers and advertisements. As colonial historians ...”

“... be not the intolerable wrestle with words, but, as it were, a further wrestle with the wrestle. Thomas Mann, like Hill, an artist wary of the claims and capacities of art, lamented that his Doctor Faustus was ‘joylessly earnest, not artistically happy’, and Hill’s two new books certainly tread the gravel of the joyless. Yet in the past, Hill has made ...”

“... and miniature blown-glass bimbos, as a not so grand finale. In between, we have everything from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cole to Thomas Eakins to Thomas Hart Benton; from Mary Cassatt to Georgia O’Keeffe to Eva Hesse; from the ...”

“... tried to be even-handed with respect to the duelling religious orders. Among his six are St Thomas of Canterbury (Chaucer’s ‘hooly blisful martir’); St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian mystic; St Francis of Assisi; and St Dominic, less charismatic but a better administrator, whose Domini canes (‘hounds of the Lord’) served as ...”

“... most but rather those that do not seem to have been the most widely mentioned. The exclusion of Thomas Hart Benton is tantamount to leaving Steinbeck out of a survey of the modern American novel. The exclusion of Mark Tobey has to be the result of amnesia (or megalomania). The exclusion of Dorothea Tanning as of every other exponent of post-de Chirico ...”

“... as it seems. Subsequent artists with anarchist sympathies, such as Mondrian and Barnett Newman, thought along similar lines – though, fortunately for them, they weren’t trying to depict the golden age. Also important for the painters advocated by Fénéon was another analogy. While prominent anarchists like Élisée Reclus celebrated ‘the ...”

“... would have swallowed a weaker man. In this unpretentious and deeply affectionate biography, Teresa Newman and Ray Watkinson show how fiercely Brown maintained this independence. He was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, but never as an insider. Nor was he included in the establishment of painters represented by the Royal Academy. Proud and ...”

“... Thomas More, the scrupulous martyr, is the complete English saint. But no man can be a saint in God’s eyes, and no man should be one in ours; and certainly not Thomas More. He is seen as a Catholic martyr because he died opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the King’s robbery from the Pope of the leadership of the English Church ...”

“... style (intimate letters, transcribed conversations) with a minimum of authorial mediation. Thomas De Quincey invited comparison with Rousseau in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, but relinquished Rousseau’s sense of personal control. The opium becomes a rival protagonist of his story, almost at times a rival author. It strips away the ‘veil ...”

“... revelation, and a virtual doctor of the Church, expounding theology with supreme authority – ‘Thomas Aquinas in drag’, as one critic called her. All the while she remains the same Florentine lady he cherished on Earth.Throughout his life, Dante engaged in an audacious project of self-exegesis and self-correction. The Vita Nuova anthologises his earlier ...”