“... loaves’ per week, for a year, to an anchorite at the church of St Leonard. A decade earlier Thomas Dunham, rector of Little Torrington, left twenty shillings and ‘a book of Sunday sermons written in English’ to an anchoress in Exeter called Alice. I’ve sometimes wondered if the three sisters’ patron was their father, brother or another family ...”

“... the bell. They made way for me in the tiny vestibule, their faces pinched with worry. ‘He’s more settled now,’ the son whispered, anxious that his father might overhear, ‘but he thinks his number’s up.’ I nodded: his impressions might be more useful than whatever Mr Lagnari would tell me. He was leaning ...”

“... preconceptions at all. Yet his Enlightened perspective has this disadvantage, that it can make him more alert to the similarities between his 17th-century and his 18th-century heroes than to the differences. This book is, however, no mere rehearsal of 18th-century preferences. Joined to them are the gains of 20th-century experience and of 20th-century ...”

“... content straight down the reader’s throat, for content is what matters most. This may beg a lot more questions, but except to critics it is clear enough. When W.H. Davies says he saw the wind dragging the corn by her golden hair into a dark wood, the startling and exciting information goes straight inside us. Complex reactions then occur; theorists of ...”

“... to the Serious Crime Squad of that force. Most recently, the Home Secretary’s proposal to send more people to prison has been attacked by prison governors and half a dozen of the country’s senior judges. The abandonment of the trial of the West Midlands police officers had been preceded by the trial of three Surrey police officers for perjury and ...”

“... annotations to his collection of attacks on himself and you will see Pope embroiled in a struggle more compulsive than any of the fencing of the Restoration wits whom he followed. It is often impossible to know whether all his marginal lines and crosses, his underlinings and apostrophes, are scratched in anger or in triumph. Perhaps it is often both, for they ...”

“... so creatively if the book had not made a huge impression ten years before. The witty knight – as Thomas Shelton, Cervantes’s contemporary and most sinewy English translator, termed Don Quixote – had ridden instantly into the world’s imagination along with his squire. Even so, Cervantes may have had one reason at least to be grateful to the apocryphal ...”

“... or (in one of the most bizarre legislative expressions of Protestant paranoia) own a horse worth more than £5.Pope was born in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, which for Catholics was rather less glorious than it was to their Protestant countrymen. Despite his size, his religion, and the sinister nominative determinism of his name, he managed ...”

“... and viewer. Instead of merely describing their characters’ costumes, writers could suggest, more or less obliquely, how a character felt wearing and manipulating what he wore, how that affected his temper or behaviour, and how all this might affect other characters. Trollope, for example, has a man calling on a lady to propose marriage. Awkwardly, he ...”

“... its distribution. Yet there were reasons to be fearful, and in Cold War American culture there was more than enough fear to go around. Some forms of fear specially afflicted scientists. First, there was concern that political support might translate into political control. There were the Marxists – not all that many, of course, in America – who had ...”

“... their rivals. The result is extraordinary and often depressing. ‘Unexpected disasters,’ Keith Thomas wrote in Religion and the Decline of Magic, ‘the sudden death of a child, the loss of a cow, the failure of some routine household task – all could, in default of any more obvious explanation, be attributed to the ...”

“... In practice the personal monarch was just as susceptible to ego-massage as anyone else, if not more so, and a single counsellor could all too easily monopolise the royal affections and the royal ear, along with access to the rest of the royal person, and the royal purse. The fatal and perennial vulnerability of monarchy to this sort of abuse seems to have ...”

“... from the after-effects of a childhood cricket injury.Biographers of Grey, including the latest, Thomas Otte, have taken these three incidents in their stride, granting them a few incurious sentences at most. Instead they have dwelled on Grey’s love of homely nature: his passion for fly-fishing and bird-watching, his long weekends in Hampshire, his ...”

“... and painstaking scholarship is used to try and dislodge it. Of course, Solomon’s Mozart is a far more sympathetic figure than Hildesheimer’s, but Solomon is also a more attractive advocate of the good Mozart than Hildesheimer is of the dysfunctional. Solomon loves Mozart and writes about him with a certain ...”

“... the most penetrating and uncompromising thinker of the civil wars, authority’s friend Thomas Hobbes? The cast list remains dominated by Levellers and sects. Though Hill’s confrontational stance has yielded to scholarly circumspection, the category of radicalism continues to nourish, in Dmitri Levitin’s words, ‘the idea that critical or ...”