“... the bishop of London, at the churches of St Martin-le-Grand and St Mary Arches, belonging to the king and archbishop of Canterbury respectively. But many schools are recorded, one way or another, often outside cities: Orme counts more than 70 in the 13th century, their number steadily increasing – in an appendix he lists more than 400 in England and Wales ...”

“... the university and the broader public. Many of them were historians, including Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam. But none of these ‘public intellectuals’ reached a larger audience or had a greater social ...”

“... with God’. An American couple leave their native California for an isolated corner of Mexico. Richard Everton’s ancestors owned a ranch in Ibarra long ago. They quarried copper out of the local mine. Memories of the splendid past were preserved in photographs of adobe houses and bougainvillea under skies of heliotrope blue. On arrival the Evertons ...”

“... in Alistair Cooke’s great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of ...”

“... a supplement of 20 native saints (published in a separate EETS volume), including Aldhelm, Edward King and Martyr, Augustine of Canterbury, Dunstan, Frideswide and Brendan. First printed in 1483, the Golden Legend saw eight more editions, the last by Wynkyn de Worde in 1527, and its popularity showed no sign of waning on the eve of the Reformation. But a ...”

“... the right kind of ideas. If it was an old notion that the philosopher was best fitted to be king, the new twist was that the economist was now disclosed as the real boss. Here was a happy prospectus for Keynes’s own profession, and one borne out by post-war experience. The Keynesian injunction that government had a responsibility to create jobs took ...”

“... man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of recent years is the group of translations, by Thomas Kinsella, of poems assembled by Sean O Tuama, and brought out in a dual-language anthology called An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the ...”

“... issued under the Great Seal allowing him to seize pirates too, and an even more unusual grant from King William stating that the Adventure Galley and her owners could keep everything she took – no tedious Vice-Admiralty courts and sharing of the spoils, nothing to be given back to the original owners. With these papers and a vessel that gauged 287 ...”

“... but transformed them. Above all, it turned social markers into political ones. That is Richard Wrigley’s contention in his fascinating study of the changing meaning of appearances from 1789 to the Napoleonic period. Right from the start, as the Revolutionaries tried to create an entirely new society, the vestimentary symbols of the Old Regime ...”

“... chemistry, quarrelled with leading figures and advanced slowly. His close friend, the chemist Richard Willstätter, said that Haber’s ‘early failure was complete and of long duration’. Einstein had his doctoral thesis rejected, was turned down as a teaching assistant, and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every ...”

“... whose plot hinged on fearsome resistance to foreign occupation. His first novel, Zabiba and the King, gave a telling clue to his approach to government: at one point, the heroine urges an Iraqi leader ‘to arrest all’ who had known about an assassination plot, ‘as well as all those who may have taken part’. A semi-autobiographical work, Men and the ...”

“... Duke of Gloucester, who represented George V at the coronation) had bowed before the Black king. ‘We of the black race are now free.’ Haile Selassie was, he said, the Black Messiah. Events unfolded from this point in a way that becomes familiar as Subin’s book goes on.Howell was imprisoned by the colonial authorities and while detained wrote The ...”

“... Mixed moments of mythology. Virgil’s Iliad with the Greeks inside the burning city. Was it Troy? King Priam meeting his murderer and calling him a ‘degenerate’, a word I didn’t know in English, let alone in Latin. But I continued construing as far as the Death of Dido. Thirty years before, the late ...”

“... so many millions of dollars adapting this novel. When Ran or ‘Chaos’, a Japanese version of King Lear, opens in London next year, it will doubtless be accompanied by A.K., Chris Marker’s documentary on its veteran director Akira Kurosawa. The plum documentary on the toils of film-making remains, however, Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, a record of the ...”

“... It scarcely matters in these circumstances that one of the best essays in the collection, J.P. Stern’s on Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull in the light of Nietzschean views of metaphor and morality, should be concerned solely with German literature. It is principally by asking what a literary canon is that the editor has sought to give some sort of shape ...”