“... 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 ...”

“... the mid-19th century, when evicted crofters and their families had to choose between a subsidised passage across the Atlantic or destitution at home. In fact, as the 18th century wore on, both the government and the big landlords took against emigration – the government fearing the loss of recruits to the Highland regiments, the landlords worried by the ...”

“... Whitehall, into which visitors can sink while gazing up at the enormous panels Rubens painted for Charles I. Hardie shows how these ceiling paintings reworked classical images of celestial ascent to make political statements. Rubens’s Whitehall ceiling pays tribute to Charles’s father, James VI and I, promotes an ...”

“... Inglis introduces us to the mourners – Terry Eagleton, ‘small, solid, mischievous’; Charles Swann, ‘wheezing with his awful respiration’; Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is ...”

“... this numinous figure has recently been designated ‘the peak performer’ in a detailed study by Charles Garfield, a former world-class weight-lifter who went on to receive a doctorate in clinical psychology. Leaving the rats to his behaviourist colleagues, Dr Garfield went out to take a close look at people who have cultivated ‘what the German writer ...”

“... second Mrs de Winter thinks that modesty has ‘something to do with minding meeting people in a passage on the way to the bathroom’. This may be a limited interpretation of one of the great Christian virtues but it is pointing in the right direction. Yet the same person, when she hears that her husband murdered his first wife, instead of deploring the ...”

“... or bad, clever or stupid? Stendhal asks himself in the summer of 1832 is the opening of a poem by Charles Boyle. Wet from the shower    towelling your breasts you ask me if I’ve read    Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic goes Michael Hulse’s poem ‘Fornicating and Reading the Papers’. Meanwhile, Didsbury has ‘The sky is like an entry in ...”

“... This was one of the most resourceful and engaging of Genette’s Cratylists, the poet and linguist Charles Nodier, writing in 1828 about the hopes he had felt as an 18-year-old, fired as he then was no doubt by the propaganda of the French Revolution. For the dream of linguistic unity could hardly not have a politics to go with it. This could as well be a ...”

“... and ensure that the Indian Christians, though still a minority, would eventually come to govern. Charles Kingsley – another of the founders – supported the South in the American Civil War. The passage of time did not bring any further coherence to Christian socialism: a theologically-based morality does not confer any ...”

“... to only one part of the island. The original problems remain, with a malignancy enhanced by the passage of time, in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland remains a mirror image of the original ‘Irish problem’, but with the very considerable complication that the political balance militates against the application of a similar solution. The period between ...”

“... for phrase-making was only surpassed by his historical inaccuracy, depicted him in a memorable passage in Coningsby as ‘the Arch-Mediocrity who presided rather than ruled over this Cabinet of Mediocrities’. Disraeli went on: The Arch-Mediocrity himself had some glimmering traditions of political science. He was sprung from a laborious stock, had ...”

“... reads like a series of postcards home, complete with snaps: Self with the Queen, Self with Prince Charles, Kenyatta, Chairman Hua, Lee Kuan Yew, Self receiving life-membership of the NUT (some gift!), Self receiving honorary doctorate, Self in state robes. The great events of history alternate, paragraph by cosy paragraph, with the great events of his ...”