“... the text to the capacity of ordinary people. What is dangerous is to interpret such a passage literally, instead of looking for its true meaning. It has sometimes been suggested that Bellarmino was a better philosopher of science than Galileo, or at least a more forward-looking one, since he anticipated the relativism of later centuries. If so, we ...”

“... effortlessly since birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door ...”

“... broadcasts from the House of Commons and to which many have not become accustomed even by the passage of time are not a new phenomenon. ‘The scene of noise and uproar which the House of Commons now exhibits is perfectly disgusting,’ remarked Charles Greville on 4 April 1835, observing that any subtlety of reaction ...”

“... very clear nor very impressive. He certainly sees the history of Western moral existence as a passage from order to chaos; and he recognises that much of the impetus towards chaos comes from practical features of social organisation. But he also believes (unless I have misunderstood him) that at least some of the impetus has come from the philosophical ...”

“... argument inside the anthropological analyses of Arnold van Gennep, concerned with ‘rites of passage’, and of Victor Turner, investigating ‘pilgrimage’. But not all his forays outside of literature are so happy. Particularly unfortunate are his not infrequent appeals to Freud: ‘The fetishist’s quest stops short of the terrible revelation that a ...”

“... too: the lawyer William Prynne was sentenced to life imprisonment and had his ears cropped after a passage in his book against plays, Histriomastix, was interpreted as an attack on the queen; Milton’s friend Alexander Gil (the younger) was also fined and threatened with similar mutilation after toasting the health of the assassin of ...”

“... and spears, Tudor merchant rings and ornate dress hooks, memorabilia celebrating the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza in 1662, a lead seal belonging to the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa (c.1660-75). The skeleton of a 12-year-old girl who died in the 18th century, a ball and chain (still locked, probably from one of the prison ...”

“... the depleted printers ‘could gett no better’. Fascinated with Roman remains, Aubrey took Charles II to see Avebury in 1663 after discovering the stones while hunting with aristocratic friends; he commissioned drawings of the 12th-century Osney Abbey before it was demolished. Like all busy people, he worked all the time, and felt he wasn’t working ...”

“... Robespierre, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Richelieu, Wolsey, Cranmer, Cromwell, Charles I and James II was now to be found lamenting ‘this horrible book on Louis XIV’, which he had never wanted to write, and mislaying the uncompleted manuscript of his life of Elizabeth Tudor. Throughout, his battle-cry was, as this book reminds us, that ...”

“... man’s cock going into your beloved’s cunt.’ Beneath its forced grandiloquence, the first passage is little more than a series of commonplaces working overtime to disguise their emotional thinness. (What is the function of the references to the Argolid mountains or Bertrand Russell except to distract from the over-familiarity of the argument?) The ...”

“... surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him’: incidentally, a passage of which the Greek (Septuagint) translation does not use the Greek word ‘blaspheme’, perhaps to avoid a range of implication – slander, speaking ill of somebody, not necessarily just of God – that is not present in the Hebrew. Still, in this ...”

“... geniuses, saints – ‘are poor mirrors’. I am reminded (though the parallel is not exact) of Charles Rosen’s remark in The Classical Style (1971), that if there can be a history of music (which is not certain) it will have to be a record, not of the normal, but of the exceptional and the unique. Fascinating as is Origo’s account of Datini’s ...”

“... all prayer factories. So when, in 1536, Bishop Hugh Latimer wrote to Henry VIII just after the passage of a Parliamentary act dissolving smaller monasteries, he made a sharp political point, although with an inexact grasp of Church history: ‘The founding of monasteries argued purgatory to be; so the putting of them down argueth it not to be . . . Now ...”

“... through the cribriform plate of the skull, and then flush warm medicated shampoo through the nasal passage, washing out any lurking palynomorphs. Wiltshire says that she has worked on cases where the presence of a single pollen grain changed the reconstruction of someone’s last moments.Palynology has many other forensic applications. Analysis of pollen from ...”

“... of death transformed into an actual avatar of retribution. Its square format underscores the passage from the horizontality of oppression to the verticality of revolt, which arrives in the next etching, Arming in a Vault, where rebel revenants ascend from the dark with scythes carried aloft like swords. In Charge, the peasant woman has become Black ...”