“... at the block, and the headsman had to pin her down. Even the more sedate accounts agree that, like Thomas Cromwell, she was hacked about by a second-string executioner. Higginbotham’s narrative begins with this bungled beheading – so either the jacket designer was in the dark about the contents, or someone at her publisher has a mordant sense of ...”

“... struck by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why ...”

“... was a conventionally ‘manly’ king. The charge that Richard was immature was made explicitly by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, in the sermon he preached on Richard’s deposition in 1399. There he contrasted the ‘boy’, Richard, with his supplanter, the ‘man’, Henry IV. He also elaborated on the childlike characteristics that rendered ...”

“... Lewes wrote, ‘one of that class whose unwritten poems, undemonstrated discoveries, or untested powers, are confidently announced as certain to carry everything before them, when they appear. Only they never do appear.’ Clough’s premature demise seemed in keeping with this general impression of hopelessness. ‘I cannot say his death took me altogether ...”

“... how much knowledge is limited by national boundaries. The Macmillan has a nice photograph of Dylan Thomas but does not say why anybody should bother to read him, only that he died of drink. Longman by contrast gives a carefully-worded appreciation, taken from Columbia. Macmillan says that St Thomas Aquinas is one of the most ...”

“... Bacon’s the tobacconist, and on Bacon’s wall, if it stands yet, there’s an engraved poem by Thomas Calverley of which I can still quote a stave or two when maundering over the port and nuts (before the brandy stage): Thou who when cares attack, bidst them avaunt and black Care from the horseman’s back, vaulting unseatest. Sweet when blah blah in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lilla calls the Great Separation: the sharp distinction between politics and God proclaimed by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century but rarely implemented as vigorously and decisively as Lilla would like. Deeply affected by the religious wars of early modern Europe, Hobbes wanted to ratchet down the stakes of political conflict. If adversaries no longer ...”

“... the grounds that she too was plain) and of her incapacity to please despite the efforts she made. Thomas Staley, in his study of Jean Rhys’s fiction, discusses the sad fate of her heroines at the hands of ‘a male-dominated bourgeois society’ and refers to them as victims of ‘negative narcissism’, a condition ‘where the female, treated exclusively ...”

“... had to be thanks to the dizzying succession of treaties of offence and defence between Europe’s powers. Henry’s first effort to flex his muscles in France, in 1513, saw him lead an army of something like 28,000 men joined in France by around seven thousand German and Dutch mercenaries. At the same time a force of more than 26,000 marched north at speed to ...”

“... cared? It was part of their punishment. Denmark sent convicts to its Caribbean colony of St Thomas, where they cleared land, planted crops, fished and built houses. The British employed the inmates of their ‘model’ penal colony at Mazaruni, Guyana, established in 1842, to quarry granite, a commodity that commanded high prices. It was a bonus that ...”

“... medicine: here is a therapeutic technique of proven efficacy which is quite beyond the vaunted powers of Western scientific patho-anatomy to explain. There is much truth in claims of this sort, so often touted by Western alternative medicine fans on behalf of indigenous Chinese medicine. As is quite clearly brought out in The Essential Book of Traditional ...”

“... become themselves, whereas Corvo or Lowry, Hamilton or Conrad Aitken, and maybe poets like Dylan Thomas and John Berryman of more recent date, are celebrated inside their own time-warp, relished as creatures of their epoch. A disillusioned devotee is the worst that can happen to them; and although I enjoyed rereading Twenty Thousand Streets and reviewing it ...”

“... who has produced the strongest case against his brothers has spurned the mantle of revolutionary. Thomas McKeown has long argued on epidemiological grounds that modern medicine cannot claim much credit for the shift in mortality and morbidity in the Western world. Criticism of medicine which attempts to penetrate its vital organs has always come from ...”

“... through river nymphs to abstractions such as Victory, Fortune, Fear and Rumour. They invoked these powers through a great variety of practices, including blood sacrifice, prayer, cursing, libation, oracular consultation and healing rituals. Their sacred world was so capacious that it happily welcomed new gods from elsewhere – a phenomenon discussed by Ralph ...”