“... of Giordano Bruno, Hill seems to have promoted a little-known rebellion on the death of Queen Elizabeth, a doomed and farcical adventure apparently intended to establish, on the unpromising soil of Lundy Island, a Utopian republic akin to that planned by his contemporary Tommaso Campanella in southern Italy. The concluding essay, on the relationship of ...”

“... his rucksack, all his travellers cheques, than admit such diminution. Ranging between London and North Africa, Israel and somewhere (close to Jamestown?) called Merriland, his new book is pitched at street-level. It asks to be called vivid, and often is – though, profligate of detail, Boyle can overplay the enchantment of objects: Volvos imported by ...”

“... spotted an advertisement for Whale Cay, a tiny island in the British West Indies thirty miles north-west of Nassau and ninety miles east of Miami. After visiting and chatting with its two residents – a black lighthouse keeper and his wife – she bought the island outright for $40,000. ‘I am going to live surrounded only by coloured people,’ she ...”

“... where threatened species live now, or do you try to set aside land, say, a hundred miles to the north of where a species now lives in anticipation of warmer global temperatures shifting ecosystems northward? Is a hundred miles far enough? Too far? Given all the unknowns, does this strategy make any sense? As the recent UN report notes, more than half a ...”

“... it … [Blair] cited a New Yorker essay full of barbed quotes about Hillary from [Sally] Quinn and Elizabeth Dole, the senator’s wife, plus a popular new novel about the 1992 election, Primary Colors. All she knew of that book, said Hillary, was that she cussed like a sailor and was portrayed in a graphic one-night stand with George Stephanopoulos, of all ...”

“... Oxford don Edmund Campion. Before he converted from Protestantism, he had mightily impressed Queen Elizabeth with his rhetorical performance on her visit to the university, but after his well-publicised return to England on mission he was hanged, drawn and quartered on Elizabeth’s authority in 1581, having refused all ...”

“... the election.*On an unannounced visit to the Korean demilitarised zone, including a few steps into North Korean territory itself with Kim Jong-un, the president brings along one of his favourite Fox News hosts, Tucker Carlson, as well as Ivanka. Carlson says of North Korea: ‘It’s a disgusting place, obviously. So ...”

“... its final collapse, reduced to a state of ‘Gothic night’, and visited by curious tourists from North America who have the ruins pointed out by a helpful guide: ‘Here Chatham’s eloquence in thunder broke,/Here Fox persuaded, or here Garrick spoke.’ The tone of the poem is elusive, at once elegiac and grimly amused, and certainly not triumphalist; but ...”

“... bedtime stories by the nuns: Joan of Arc was like the young saints Perpetua and Felicity in Roman North Africa who faced the wild beasts in the arena, and her torments recalled the sadistic horrors which any number of martyrs in the Golden Legend undergo before they are finally dispatched by their executioners. The parallels between Joan’s sufferings and ...”

“... evidence, failing in our view to grasp the strength and depth of concerns expressed (particularly north of the border) about the timing of our endeavours. ‘We mustn’t let the tail wag the dog’ was a refrain from some when we raised these points, even as it became clear to us that the real tail in our work has been rooted firmly in central ...”

“... form, when it came to beggaring explanation, well before she embarked on Wuthering Heights. While Elizabeth Gaskell was researching her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), someone lent her a ‘most extraordinary’ packet containing an ‘immense amount of manuscript’ written in a hand impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass. These ...”

“... in that it’s Priestley on one of his favourite themes, that of escape and escape from the North particularly. Act I, Scene I ends like this: Leonard: Where yer going? Oakroyd (at door): Down south. Exit to triumphant music from the gramophone. And earlier: Oakroyd: I’d like to go down south again. I’d like to have a look at … oh well ...”

“... war itself often had little impact. When in July 1943, after the Allies had driven the Axis out of North Africa and crossed the Mediterranean, Channon said to Laura Corrigan, ‘Isn’t it wonderful about Sicily?’ she replied: ‘Sicily who?’One difference​ between the two diaries is particularly striking: Nicolson writes about people with almost ...”

“... over the fireplace are far from being the daubs I thought they were but reputedly come from Queen Elizabeth I’s state barge and may even have accompanied Drake round the world on the Golden Hind.22 February. Jocelyn Herbert’s 80th birthday party at the Royal College of Art, the Senior Common Room packed with everyone Jocelyn has known or worked ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this marathon on hold to sprint through examinations. What on earth was he doing? Fending off the boredom ...”