“... that she had been unfaithful to Cleary, who was often away at Clonmel. One possible lover was William Simpson, a man hated by many locals because he worked as a ‘heavy’ for the landlord. Bridget, always a defiant individualist, did his shopping when local grocers refused to serve him. (This may have helped the couple to secure the house from the ...”

“... house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation. The previous year, Elizabeth had selected her own beau; this time it was all planned to further Sam’s new ...”

“... by them. Which recalls Auden’s inversion in ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ of Motley’s epitaph on William the Silent: ‘When he cried, the little children died in the streets.’ Edmund Burke was accused by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine of putting it on in his lament for Marie Antoinette, but Burke protested that he had wept as he wrote and that the ...”

“... by kicking on the floor. He knows them to be committed Christians, as he is. ‘Hear me, Christian neighbours!’ he thinks. ‘Hear your brother just above!’ But ‘no one is listening. No one is waiting to hear the kicking of a man above. It is unexpected. You have no ears for someone like me.’ The Christians downstairs are the imagined ...”

“... to photographic accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could follow and explain to one another. Not that it had to be ...”

“... the supernatural. The alchemical papers at King’s have produced several books, most recently William R. Newman’s Newton the Alchemist (2018). All promote the idea that alchemy and science were, in their own time, inseparable, and that rationalism and occultism were very far from vying for each other’s extinction and the esteem of posterity.Outside ...”

“... Elizabeth could rely on steadfast service from German relations such as her first cousin Christian of Brunswick, who was wounded at the Battle of Fleurus in 1622; fitted with a silver prosthesis, he assured Elizabeth that despite having ‘lost one arm in her service’, he ‘had another and a life left to spend in her quarrel’. Given Akkerman’s ...”

“... Dante’s work the ideal challenge to historicist thinking, and we might say the same about the Christian tradition of figural connection as Auerbach sees it. These ways of making sense of the world are powerfully alien to us and that is why we need to understand them, especially because we tend to think of them as abstract or ideological or ...”

“... in Arabia but in Libya, and two centuries too early, but no matter: Muhammad was a foil for the Christian preoccupations of the day, heresy foremost among them. Muhammad, in the European imagination, was a repository of heresies: like Arius or Eunomius he thought Christ wasn’t as great as God; like Sabellius, he rejected the trinity; he was polygamous ...”

“... history’ in which political events are a backdrop to his narrative of Christian conversion. On the non-Anglo-Saxon (or native British) side, Gildas wrote about contemporary events in the fifth and sixth centuries in his On the Destruction of Britain, but only to denounce contemporary sinners; and the ninth-century Historia ...”

“... to Christianity but also as a scientific alternative to Theosophy and the healing pretensions of Christian Science. He skilfully, even disingenuously, drew out from the Vedas a faith unblemished by the moral and intellectual shortcomings of Christianity. It didn’t burden individuals with guilt or scare them with the anger of a distant god. It released them ...”

“... In 1919, after prolonged study, the Harvard ethologist William Morton Wheeler pronounced the male wasp ‘an etiological nonentity’. An animal behaviourist had scrutinised the male wasp and found – no behaviour. We can well imagine the male wasp’s response to such a verdict: his initial shock and hurt; his descent into a period of depressed introspection; his eventual decision to improve his act ...”

“... he was impressed by Flemish painting. Later he studied at Ghent and in the Antwerp Academy. Unlike William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, or Edward Burne-Jones, Brown profited from a broad and thorough education in the business of painting. Later, his art became a passion and a vocation. But it never ceased to be a job from which a living had somehow to be ...”

“... role. For all Hughes’s throwaway manner and air of untroubled expertise (he sometimes reads like William Empson trying his hand at a tale of adventure), there is, as with Kipling, a kind of innocence which is part of the charm. When Amabel Williams-Ellis, who read the first draft of A High Wind for him, sensibly objected that there could not but have been ...”

“... Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly ...”