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“... where else do you get a name like that?’ To us cocky British snobs who call the great man ‘Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ and don’t much mind what he called himself, the ‘mistake’ of the tourists is not tragical. But, for William Gaddis, this sort of ignorance leads up to the climax of The Recognitions, where his most admirable character – Stanley, the ...”

“... author (George Gilder), a leading radical economist (Tom Weisskopf) and the creator of Jaws (Peter Benchley). About a quarter of us had come to Harvard from one of ten famous boarding schools of the northeast, but about a half had attended public high schools across the country. With its massive endowments supporting extensive scholarships, Harvard had ...”

“... without the Shakespeare. The Preface is all suspicious brevity on the matter: ‘We regret that Martin Gilbert was unable to come to the conference.’ Perhaps Gilbert was simply busy, or recuperating from a white-water rafting or a hang-gliding contretemps. But of course the words can also be interpreted to mean that Gilbert was invited, but not offered ...”

“... and in each of the synoptic gospels he commissions his disciples to do the same – the historian Peter Brown suggests it was the ‘most highly rated activity’ of the early Church. The ancient Mediterranean was populated by wandering holy men and charismatic healers, for whom exorcism was something between medicine and miracle. Church leaders who are ...”

“... he declared, in the manner of a true Yorkshireman.’ Readers who cringe easily should stick with Martin Booth’s dutiful The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle (1997). Stashower has a lot more imagination, Booth a few more facts. And while Stashower’s slapdash enthusiasm does more justice to the spiritualist episodes than Booth’s ...”

“... before the essentially triangular fullness of their relationship is presented to the audience. As Peter Holland points out in English Comedy (1994), such relationships are notoriously hard to bring into dramatic equilibrium, and Design for Living is perhaps the first play to hold the balance between three sides by pointing them inwards. In the same way, Hay ...”

“... Il Cortegiano (1528) – and lists 34 titles including Edward Hoby’s Afternoon Belchings; Martin Luther’s On Shortening the Lord’s Prayer; and The Art of copying out within the compass of a Penny all the truthful statements made to that end by John Foxe. ‘With these books at your elbow,’ Donne suggests, ‘you may in almost every branch of ...”

“... not much has changed since Alison Smithson’s day. The chapter on Smithson, who with her husband, Peter, achieved a reputation out of all proportion to the number of buildings they put up, is one of Cooke’s best. Born in 1928, Smithson is among the youngest of the women she considers. A contemporary of Margaret Thatcher, Smithson, like Thatcher, made her ...”

“... how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’ There is a flirtatious edge to this. Martin Amis, in a piece reporting on Blair’s last weeks in office, also described himself flirting with Blair. Some men have that effect on other men; it’s not a gay thing exactly, but it’s not the opposite of a gay thing, and there is something faintly ...”

“... as of the continual experimentation involved, he moved to Berlin to work in the office of Peter Behrens, ‘a colossus of daunting stature’. He had no contact with Behrens himself, but did learn about ‘rhythm and subtle relations and many other things previously unknown to me’. That admission must have cost him dear: he was strikingly ungrateful ...”

“... the SWP had recruited various politicians and celebrities to an Anti-Nazi League. They included Peter Hain, an anti-apartheid activist who was now working for the postal workers’ union and had recently joined the Labour Party; Neil Kinnock, an up-and-coming Welsh MP from the party’s far left; and the actress Miriam Karlin, famous for playing a bolshie ...”

“... with the essence and idea of National Socialism.’ On 7 May 1941 the increasingly powerful Martin Bormann, the effective head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, sent a circular to party officials complaining that ‘confessional and occult circles have attempted to spread confusion and insecurity among the people through the conscious dissemination of ...”

“... in Dallas ran a conference in November. Nor is More much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 ...”

“... in the genre, whether it be the prototypical Odysseus, the 16th-century French peasant Martin Guerre, who has to displace an impostor, or Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, who is received so badly that he relinquishes all claims, including to his own name: ‘But now I am buried underneath the living, under papers, under acts, under the whole of ...”

“... attached fireworks. The finale in 1579 of the annual display in Rome to mark the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul made the engraver Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla feel ‘as if all the air in the world is filled with fireworks, and all the stars in the heavens are falling to earth – a thing truly stupendous, and marvellous to behold’. Reformation and ...”