“... Tedworth excited the interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were ...”

“... then declare that their privacy needs to be protected from the flash of the paparazzo’s camera. Christopher Lasch, writing well ahead of Big Brother and the tide of reality TV shows, noted in The Culture of Narcissism that ‘modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions – and our ...”

“... Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which ...”

“... to ‘general population’, Knox met Alessia, ‘who worked in the commissary’ and was ‘the black-market FedEx’ for notes, cigarettes and CDs, and Wilma, ‘who worked in the kitchen and had access to coveted garlic cloves, and who, if you were lucky, would clip you a sprig from the rosemary bush’. The Nigerian inmates nicknamed Knox ...”

“... notary Ser Petracco, the previous year. That she died in 1348 makes her a probable victim of the Black Death. According to a venerable tradition Laura was a Provençal woman called Laure de Noves, born in about 1310. She married Hugo or Hughes de Sade, of a landed family from Le Thor, a few miles south-east of Avignon. The marriage contract is dated 6 ...”

“... ask themselves ‘whether there might possibly be some mistake’. The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to ...”

“... family and friends would eat al fresco while children played on the antique swing beneath the black poplar or tumbled in Hetta’s hammock amidst laburnum and laurel. Here, too, on sunny days, William would sit and read, stripped to the waist: he loved the open air. Early on (they had bought the house in 1960), Hetta had made a shallow, kidney-shaped pond ...”

“... on a scholarship to study painting. Soon afterwards, spotted at a New Year’s Eve party wearing black stockings, she was the talk of Carshalton. ‘Well, no one wore black stockings,’ Penrose remembers, ‘so it was “Ahhh”.’Wimbledon, however, was not exciting. The painting department was stuck in a prewar ...”

“... and to Saddam Hussein’s Iraqis and sympathises with their political grievances – against black Communism or against overweening Israel. Bull is portrayed as a man appalled by the idea of death,paying frequent visits to the First World War graveyards of Europe and shedding tears at the thought of young men slain in their prime by artillery. Yet this ...”

“... for Nuclear Disarmament and, on the first Aldermaston march, ‘walked with Doirs Lessing, Christopher Logue and Kenneth Tynan’. Twice he was arrested and Vicky drew him as a convict in broad arrows. The year 1968 found him with the insurgents in the Sorbonne, but in Britain ‘few shared my enthusiasm for the students of Paris.’ In many ways he ...”

“... the rising up of women against men’. To capture a homosexual would be like ‘the finding of the black tulip’. What she finds, inevitably, is Bruce Chat-win, laid up with jaundice outside Padua and longing for company, but no more. There is also Gore Vidal (‘unobtainable’) and the diplomat, Fred Warner, who declines her proposal of marriage on the ...”

“... onto the stage only once, with the revolt of the peasants of Upper Austria in 1626. They carried black flags bearing a skull and the words ‘It must be,’ because, as Wedgwood remarks, they knew that ‘the revolt would probably mean death for its leaders, whether they won or lost.’ However, neither she nor Gerhard Benecke, in the brief space allotted to ...”

“... I used to go to clandestine meetings in his room in the House, where an ill-assorted group – Christopher Price, David Owen, John Mackintosh, Jack Ashley and myself – drank whisky and talked devaluation. When devaluation finally came, I hoped he would become Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he did not, I hoped – incredible as it seems in retrospect ...”

“... They looked to Lord Braxfield, who is introduced by Royle as another in his gallery of homespun, black-a-vised, bad-mouthed worthies. Before transporting Muir, he stated: ‘A Government in every country should be just like a Corporation: and, in this country, it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented; as for the ...”

“... an ‘undiscovered country’ and the title-page of Vesalius’s great work accordingly features Christopher Columbus, gesturing knowingly towards the dissected corpse, as if to reinforce the words of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.’ Echoes of the notion that psychological ...”