“... the last twenty years, this negative consensus has been chipped away at by many historians. Yet major barriers to a genuine reassessment of Mary’s Church remain. The greatest of these is the burning of more than 280 Protestant men, women and teenagers between February 1555 and November 1558. This was the most intense religious persecution anywhere in ...”

“... gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While ...”

“... the point when it had reached its fashionable peak, but passed its heyday as a hunting ground for major antiquities and old master paintings. It follows that there are no great works of classical art on show. The only important antiquities on the Westmorland are now lost, a pair of priapic marble fauns belonging to the collector Charles Townley. In their ...”

“... time. (Before setting off to walk in Izaak Walton’s footsteps, he ‘fortifies himself with a major fry-up’; and skewers Walton for lifting ‘other people’s work left, right and centre’). Even if his word-hoard is leaden, the aroma of wonder seeps through his sentences. Buried beneath the anecdote and the arcana is the poignancy of the ...”

“... capacity of 100 kilotons; at Sellafield, thirty miles further round the coast and the next major employer after Barrow, is a nuclear waste reprocessing plant which has discharged millions of gallons of ‘low-grade’ radioactive waste into the Irish Sea. Just before I went up to Cumbria, the news broke that the area’s notoriously high incidence of ...”

“... hard for you, dealing with these wretches day after day.’ ‘No, it’s easy. I take them to a major eatery. I say, Pooh pooh pooh. I say, Drinky drinky drinky. I tell them their books are doing splendidly in the chains. I tell them readers are flocking to the malls. I say, Coochy coochy coo. I recommend the roast monkfish with savoy cabbage. I tell them ...”

“... that even a fraction of the tax owed will be recovered. In 2004 the leadership of the two major political parties, Pasok and New Democracy, was taken up by descendants of their founders: respectively, George Papandreou, son of Andreas and grandson of Georgios, and Kostas Karamanlis, nephew and namesake of the first metapolitefsi prime ...”

“... warm to Burchfield or his book. ‘Anyone who has spent nearly thirty years, as I did, editing a major dictionary on historical principles is bound to prefer a historical approach to English usage to one that is limitedly descriptive.’ This historical emphasis is coupled with a desire to produce something much closer to a standard, orthodox, reliable work ...”

“... a run-of-the-mill effort. They were wrong. The novel went on to win an unprecedented five major prizes in its first year and made the New York Times bestseller list. From a standing start, Patricia Cornwell became a one-woman fiction factory, and a cult. She has produced seven Scarpetta novels since 1990 – a knackering rate of work which she ...”

“... ridicule as Molière chose to portray them on the stage. Precious or not, they were in favour of a major spelling reform, as comes out in a brief scene quoted by Cerquiglini from Somaize’s Grand dictionnaire des Précieuses: ‘Roxalie said that they must so go about things as to make it possible to write the same [de mesme in the French, inevitably!] as one ...”

“... a variety of scholars to discuss the history of the Italian and international working classes. Major figures on the Italian Left, such as Angelo Tasca, a companion of Gramsci in Turin in the early 1920s, and Pietro Secchia, the hard man of the PCI in the 1940s and 1950s, left their papers and even their libraries to the Institute. Having founded this ...”

“... But I wish I had pursued more energetically the quest for papers at Belvoir Castle (Lord John Manners and George Smythe), Weston Park (Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield) and Windsor Castle, where there apparently still exists a notable private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward ...”

“... but at the highest levels it was sufficiently bipartisan. In October 2002, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry voted for Bush’s request to authorise the use of force. Barack Obama, then a state senator in Illinois, gave a speech against it; and nobody who knows the history would blame the present conflict in the Middle East on Obama. Indeed, after the ...”

“... but at night he’s an amateur astronomer. He’s dismissive of fears that the association with John Wyndham’s 1950s novel won’t do the controversy-strewn world of GM any favours; and he’s done that clever thing of appropriating an opponent’s discourse: the Canadian triffid is an ironic (and more modern) riposte to all the talk about Frankenstein ...”

“... different kinds of inability to act: these are the overt themes of many of the poems in John Fuller’s inventive new volume. The title, Lies and Secrets, does not belong to any one poem, but is a warning that no statement found in the book should be relied on either for straightforwardness or for a disclosure of the whole truth. Stories are ...”