“... trials, half of which resulted in convictions, except during witch panics, when the rate usually rose. Not all communities bothered with the law. In 1705 in the fishing village of Pittenweem in Fife a mob set about Janet Cornfoot, who they believed had cast spells on the community. They dragged her to the harbour, hung her by the ankles, pelted her with ...”

“... that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met by the Bavarian ambassador, Count Karl von Spaur, who was clutching a pistol in his right hand, in case they were challenged. The fugitive was bustled into a small open carriage and driven out of the city, his face obscured by ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... is that we know absolutely nothing of his sexual life other than that he married. And his wife Rose is as elusive a personage as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Super is reduced to dredging up passages from Doctor Thorne and The Eustace Diamonds to evoke what Miss Heseltine might have been like in her lover’s eyes. In these circumstances, An Autobiography ...”

“... I thought. Down a lane called the Walk of Memory you pass Darryl F. Zanuck and Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Fanny Brice. What I remember most is the atmosphere of the cemetery: the place was more than just a repository of famous bones; a giant investment of common wishes lay deep in the polished stonework. Yet the only scent that moved through the air ...”

“... him a man with no credentials in science. Wolcot, the lampoonist, who wrote under the name of Peter Pindar, was probably not alone in finding Banks a study in vanity: an intellectual flea Hopping on Science’s broad, bony back. Although Banks did much to promote the international image of the Royal Society during his 42-year tenure as its President, he ...”

“... fifty yards to safety, or alternatively that he was buried by the explosion three days before he rose again. Though for very good reasons he wore a uniform to suggest that he had, Hemingway did not serve in the Italian Army. It was about this time, we are told, that William Faulkner wore a Royal Canadian Air Force officer’s uniform with wings, and ...”

“... sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozengewise by the heat; and as the wind rose, each lozenge rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.’ This is very ‘Martian’, with its intent observation of the surface of things, its reliance on the slightly shallow brilliance of simile as opposed to the deeper, more ...”

“... press, but the press talked about her, and after her scandalous romance with the divorced Captain Peter Townsend they talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official events. By ...”

“... the Turkish sack of Constantinople and the rise of Protestantism. He had predicted the reign of Peter the Great and Frederick the Great. Tantalisingly for Greeks in the 1750s, he also offered a vision of what awaited their descendants: an ‘era of destruction of the Mohammedans’ and the resurrection of an Orthodox empire with the help of the ‘kings of ...”

“... from bar mitzvah to auto-da-fé. I had already told my mother, not making a very good job of it. Rose-tinted spectacles is the rule when looking back at the past, though ‘pink cataracts’ might be the more accurate phrase. Researchers have found ways of correlating people’s wishful impressions with hard data, checking the age at which children learned ...”

“... Ranelagh, by the Chelsea Hospital, had to be protected by a dedicated Bow Street patrol. Felonies rose by 50 per cent, and now that felons could no longer be shipped to America, more and more of them had to be hanged. John Townsend, taken on as a runner at this time, later looked back nostalgically to this time, when ‘we never had an execution wherein we ...”

“... soon as dinner was despatched,’ he wrote of his teenage years, ‘in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, I drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder.’ Stevenson’s life has come to seem one that can offer ...”

“... sewage, the prime minister, Brian Faulkner, resigned with the executive on 28 May 1974. Trimble rose in the Unionist Party, and in 1990 was elected to the House of Commons. He was pro-Europe and was less committed to capital punishment than most Unionist MPs. Though he was the party’s youngest and most junior MP, he was already acquiring respect both as ...”

“... imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem ...”