“... back to the religion of their youth. Kselman describes, for example, the climactic moment in Roger Martin du Gard’s 1913 novel Jean Barois. Freethinking apostle of science and reason, Barois finds himself reciting a desperate Hail Mary when his horse-drawn carriage collides with two Parisian street-cars. Uninjured but morally shaken by his retreat into ...”

“... cultured English cardinal in exile, Reginald Pole, who had a better claim than Henry VIII to be king of England, became a – not uncritical – admirer of the ambiguous Spaniard. In the 1530s, it looked as if Valdesianism might shape the future of the Western Latin Church. That it did not was largely thanks to the institution that is the main focus of ...”

“... were at a loss. I had never been anywhere that felt so solid and so empty. The band’s producer, Martin Hannett, drew on Joy Division’s centrifugal tendency and pushed the band’s music into arrangements that were broken down, unproductive and full of disused space. It was the sound of their city but it could have been describing the entire country. The ...”

“... having suffered a stroke, died in bed at his rectory; and where, half a century later, Pope Martin V had his bones exhumed, burned, and the ashes thrown into the River Swift. Leicestershire folklore maintained that on the spot where one of the bones being carried to the fire fell, a spring of pure water spontaneously emerged, and became known as St ...”

“... an hour or less for City workers, not to mention Essex men and girls. After monarchs, ranging from King John, whose hunting lodge was at Writtle, to Henry VIII, who built New Hall at Boreham (still standing), came Elizabethan lord chancellors (one is buried at Saffron Walden, another at Felsted) and Georgian lord mayors and City luminaries (too many to ...”

“... of an athlete and the intellectual assurance of someone who has just been asked to work on Martin Luther King’s legal team. He rapidly takes stock of her beauty – ‘Is she one of mine?’ he asks a member of the calmly anti-semitic crowd – and guesses, as the reader does, at some intensity in the young woman ...”

“... have been, according to A. Alvarez, ‘a professional patrician’, but he was also, according to Martin Dodsworth, guilty of ‘artistic parasitism’. In his capacity as Poet Laureate, according to Julian Symons, even ‘the task of producing semiofficial occasional poems that were also of poetic interest defeated him.’ The Times obituary summed him up in ...”

“... the Congolese. This arrangement continued until 1908, when ownership of the Congo passed from the king to the Belgian state.By then the old palace was too small for its burgeoning contents. Leopold had already foreseen this and commissioned Charles Girault, the architect of the Petit Palais in Paris, to design a larger building, which opened in 1910, a year ...”

“... Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.Under cover of night, my brothers and I crept around town perpetrating ...”

“... what under-writes, and justifies, the colourful behaviour of the ghastly characters trapped within Martin Amis’s London Fields. Weather as prediction. Weather as a liquid mirror in which that sick man, the writer, reads our future. The skies run like a river of poisons, warning of crimes committed in remote countries. We are ...”

“... and the NBC show forms the backbone of Alan Bleasdale’s play. ‘Older Presley’ – played by Martin Shaw in purple pyjamas – clutches an attaché case of medications to his side, ceasing abruptly from soliloquy and self-pity to gaze spellbound at his lithesome former self. At one point, Presley, who is attended around the clock by minions, halts the ...”

“... are holding me hostage … I cannot tolerate any more.’The recipient of his disgruntlement was Martin Zapater, who would provide a vital sounding board for his friend’s frustrations and fantasies. Zapater had experienced a difficult start in Zaragoza himself, but went on to make his fortune through the buying, leasing and selling of land, becoming so ...”

“... Jean Calvin asked, lambasting the pair for filling the Gospel with ‘wicked additions’. Martin Luther thought that the papists hoped to conceal knowledge about Muhammad because they knew how similar his Alcoran was to their own adulterated brand of Christianity. He pushed for a printed edition of the Quran in Latin, and wrote the preface when it ...”

“... Should we read the darkest of his plays – including Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, King Lear and Macbeth – as artefacts of these plague-ridden times? Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists delved into almost every dark corner of their audiences’ imaginations: murder, witchcraft, incest, civil war, apostasy. Playgoers saw rape victims stagger ...”

“... of Wales asked his father, George V, if he could have the use of Fort Belvedere at Windsor the king was surprised: ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn week-ends I suppose.’ He caved in and perhaps regretted it, for the weekends with their associated guests and amusements made possible the affair with Wallis Simpson and so ...”