“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John ...”

“... first sketches in Harper’s and Putnam’s. One of eight children, seven of them female, born to Charles Jarvis Woolson and Hannah Cooper Pomeroy Woolson (James Fenimore Cooper was her uncle) in the 1830s and 1840s, Constance arrived at adolescence with only a single sister, Clara, and a brother, Charles Jarvis Jr. Though ...”

“... Roberts (the naval captain who had overseen the building of the boat) and the ‘boat boy’, Charles Vivian. They made good time: ‘a run of 45 to 50 miles in seven hours and a half’, Williams noted in his journal. A week later, Shelley, Williams and Vivian embarked on the return voyage. At around half past six a storm hit and the boat went down with ...”

“... The anthology represents him by the section of ‘Little Gidding’ in which the spirits of Charles I and Milton are jointly invoked. The political tone here is relatively conciliatory, all the more so in the final text from which the poet dropped those conservative martyrs Richard III and the Duke of Wellington. Paulin has described Geoffrey Hill as ...”