“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and diplomatic tasks which confronted her. ‘The plain fact which cannot be obscured,’ Sir Thomas Inskip, the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, said in February 1938, ‘is that it is beyond the resources of this country to make proper provision in peace for the defence of the British Empire against three major ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... opposite of the homely expertise in country matters of Hardy, or the more pointed one of Edward Thomas. The disinclination to be specific, in terms of the world of real things, gives its own sort of bleak originality to the world of Davie’s poetry – a world very much more extensive than this aspect of it would seem to indicate. The most striking thing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... thought, but rarely proven, to have helped to spread this deplorable infection. Meanwhile the powers that be seem unable to contain it, and generally take the money when it comes to hand. The situation in Algeria has a clear parallel in Sudan, where fundamentalist claims to administrative dictatorship over Christians, but also over Africans adhering to ...”

“... as a good night’s sleep. Ekirch’s first chapter is on the ‘terrors of the night’. In 1594 Thomas Nashe, the collaborator of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, published a little pamphlet, ‘speedily botched up and compiled’, as he put it, called The Terrors of the Night or A Discourse of Apparitions. It is full of digressions: ‘I have rid a false ...”

“... 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 ...”